Torture 3-13-2018

13 March 2018                                          Torture

Another Trump appointee bites the dust. Rexx Tillerson, the former Secretary of State, has been fired and replaced by Mike Pompeo, the current C.I.A. director.

Pompeo has been replaced by his deputy, Gina Haspel.

Haspel gained notoriety as a clandestine officer at the CIA in 2002 when she oversaw the torture of terror suspects and later took part in the destruction of the videotapes documenting the brutal interrogations at a secret black site prison in Thailand.

Over the past eight years C.I.A Leaders and their subordinates have defended the harsh interrogation methods, including waterboarding, which they have vowed to resurrect. Trump has repeatedly said he thinks torture works and Pompeo praised as “patriots” those who used such methods in the early days of the fight against Al Qaeda.

Haspel played a direct role in C.I.A’s ”extraordinary rendition program” under which prisoners were dispatched to foreign governments where they were tortured by agency personnel.

The praise for Haspel, despite her role in torturing detainees, reflects the agency’s ambivalent “laissez-faire” attitude towards those who participated in the interrogation program.

It is difficult to reconcile such terror methods will help in fighting the “war on terror”.

Cleary such methods have failed to force President Ashraf Ghani of Afghanistan to seek a peace agreement with the victorious Al Qaeda.  

In a perfect democracy where people are held accountable for their misdeeds, Haspel should be serving a long prison term.