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  • 2018-03-19 (xsd:date)
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  • Is There a Warrant for CIA Director Nominee Gina Haspel's Arrest? (en)
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  • The Trump administration has had its share of embattled nominees, but President Donald Trump's pick to head the Central Intelligence Agency in March 2018 is controversial even by those standards. Trump nominated the agency's deputy director, Gina Haspel, on 13 March 2018. But her record has come under question both in the U.S. and abroad because of her service while stationed at a secret CIA facility in 2002, leading to allegations that she committed war crimes (with commentary appearing, naturally, in meme form): A human rights advocacy group — the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) — has called for Haspel to be taken into custody if she travels to the continent. The group has petitioned federal prosecutors in Germany since 2014 to issue a warrant, saying: Andreas Schüller, director of the group's International Crimes and Accountability Program, has said that ECCHR does not expect that Haspel will actually face a warrant; its goal, he said, is that German officials recognize Haspel's alleged actions: Haspel, who first joined the agency in 1985 during President Ronald Reagan's administration, was reportedly in charge of a secret black site prison in Thailand at which a prisoner and terror suspect, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was waterboarded. She also allegedly supported the destruction of videotapes in 2005 capturing waterboardings at the prison. (However, a report stating that she was in charge of the facility, code-named Cat's Eye, at the time another suspect, Abu Zubaydah, was tortured was retracted.) The use of waterboarding — or enhanced interrogation, as officials called it at the time — was banned in 2009 by President Barack Obama. Five years later, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released a report criticizing the practice. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), who was the committee chair at the time, wrote in the foreword to the report: In March 2018, Feinstein called on the agency to declassify documents related to Haspel's role in the program: Two of Feinstein's GOP Senate colleagues, Rand Paul of Kentucky and John McCain of Arizona, have also called for Haspel to explain how involved she was with the agency's interrogation program while it was active. (en)
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