Gina Haspel’s CIA Torture File

Washington, D.C., April 26, 2018 – The Trump administration’s nominee to be CIA director, Gina Haspel, personally supervised the torture of a CIA detainee in 2002 leading to at least three waterboard sessions, subsequently drafted the cable that ordered destruction of the videotape evidence of torture, and served as a senior CIA official while the Agency was lying to itself, Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the Congress, and the public about the effectiveness of torture in eliciting useful intelligence, according to declassified documents posted today by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

The documents include a new and less-redacted version of the CIA Inspector General’s report from 2004, repeated references in the declassified Senate Intelligence Committee torture report to Ms. Haspel’s tenure as chief of base of the CIA black site (“Detention Site Green” in Thailand) in 2002, and other CIA documents on the contract psychologists, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, whose torture program Ms. Haspel supervised in November 2002 and supported through multiple senior CIA positions until President Obama ended the torture program in 2009.

As a senior officer in the CIA Counterterrorism Center and then at the National Clandestine Services (where she was chief of staff in 2005), Ms. Haspel played a leading role in the creation and perpetuation of the CIA’s false claims that torture uniquely produced actionable intelligence that saved lives. The exhaustive Senate Intelligence Committee torture report reviewed over 6 million pages of the CIA’s own documents and proved these justifications “rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness” and were “wrong in fundamental respects.”[1]

For the 20 major and minor claims CIA has put forward for its torture having thwarted terrorist plots or led to the capture of terrorists, the Senate Intelligence Committee report documents that in every case the actionable intelligence actually did not come from torture, but CIA officials – including Ms. Haspel – deluded themselves into believing so.[2] 

In each of the 20 cases, the Senate report shows, the key intelligence came from either non-coercive interrogation (as in the FBI’s interviews of Abu Zubaydah prior to his 83 waterboard sessions, or Dubai’s interrogation of Al-Nashiri before Mitchell and Jessen put him on the waterboard), or from other sources that the CIA quickly and secretly appropriated to claim credit for the torture sessions (as in the false claim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s torture led to the identity of the “courier” who then led the U.S. to Osama Bin Laden – in fact it was a combination of signals intelligence, a separate CIA source, and a law enforcement investigation, not torture).[3]

The CIA’s rebuttals, including multiple published books co-authored by former CIA propaganda chief Bill Harlow,[4] continue to rely on false CIA talking points dating back to the psychologists’ evaluations of their own work, along with the CYA memos written by the CIA counterterrorism officials who hired the shrinks and covered for them. Yet the CIA’s refusal to declassify Ms. Haspel’s name in CIA documents, much less her specific role in producing the false claims, means that outsiders – including the U.S. Senate – cannot understand or assess her willingness to forward false intelligence to the highest levels of the U.S. government.

The documents include a listing of 12 specific cables Ms. Haspel authored or authorized as chief of base at Detention Site Green in Thailand that, according to the CIA Inspector General report, accurately describe the torture sessions that were documented on the now-destroyed videotapes. The National Security Archive has filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA for the Gina Haspel torture cables, under the FOIA provisions that call for expedited review in conditions of urgent public interest. 

Using the waterboard on prisoners is torture. So are most of the Mitchell/Jessen techniques, such as sleep deprivation, forced nudity, wall-slamming, and facial slap. Torture is a crime under both international conventions and the U.S. Constitution prohibiting “cruel and unusual punishments.” For example, the U.S. prosecuted multiple Japanese military personnel after World War II for waterboarding American prisoners of war. The Yokohama B and C War Crimes Trials in 1947 sentenced four Japanese to hard labor sentences of between 15 and 25 years apiece for waterboarding American prisoners whom the Japanese considered to be terrorists since the U.S. Army Air Corps was at that time firebombing Japanese cities, killing tens of thousands of civilians.[5]

Ms. Haspel herself may or may not have appeared on the waterboarding videotapes that she helped order destroyed, since an October 25, 2002 cable from CIA headquarters commanded the re-use of a single videotape, thus overwriting the previous day’s torture session.[6]

The new instructions against keeping videotapes, issued at about the same time that Ms. Haspel took over command of the black site, may or may not have been drafted by Ms. Haspel herself – the CIA’s redactions to date prevent any independent assessment of her role in this matter as well as in most of the rest of the torture program.

According to the documents, the CIA established Detention Site Green on March 31, 2002 to house Abu Zubaydah, the first “high value detainee” captured by the CIA, which mistakenly assumed Zubaydah was a high-ranking Al-Qaeda operative. Zubaydah did provide extensive information not under torture, including the identification of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed as the mastermind of 9/11 during rapport-building interrogation led by FBI agent Ali Soufan, who subsequently withdrew from the black site after the CIA contract shrinks Mitchell and Jessen took over.[7] 

The Zubaydah case provides the most explicit repudiation of the purported “ticking time bomb” argument CIA has made in support of torture, since Mitchell and Jessen’s first move in Zubaydah’s torture was to place him in solitary confinement – with no questioning whatsoever – for 47 days. Mitchell and Jessen would waterboard Zubaydah 83 times in August 2002, before finally concluding he had no imminent threat information.[8]

According to “senior intelligence officials” quoted in The New York Times and by ProPublica,[9] Ms. Haspel did not arrive at Detention Site Green as chief of base until “late October” 2002 – after numerous complaints from CIA personnel there about the torture.[10]

The CIA has not released any specific dates of Ms. Haspel’s assignments at the black sites or at the Counterterrorism Center, so the record is not clear whether she was sent to rein in those complaints and enforce her boss Jose Rodriguez’s admonition not to include such language in the cable traffic, but accepting assignment (or even volunteering) to the black site after such complaints appeared in the cable traffic strongly suggests this was the case.

Ms. Haspel became chief of base at Detention Site Green just in time to welcome Al Nashiri on November 15, 2002. The alleged “mastermind” of the USS Cole bombing in 2000 that killed 17 U.S. sailors had been captured in Dubai in October and interrogated there, during which time he gave up significant intelligence, according to the Senate report.[11] Haspel’s subsequent boss and head of CIA’s Clandestine Service, Jose Rodriguez, in his memoirs characterized Nashiri as hardly a mastermind and echoed another interrogator’s description of him as “the dumbest terrorist I have ever met.”[12]

According to both the CIA IG report and the Senate Intelligence report, upon arrival at the black site in Thailand that at that moment was commanded by Ms. Haspel, Nashiri immediately underwent torture supervised by Mitchell and Jessen. Some 12 days after his arrival (ie. circa November 27, 2002), Nashiri survived at least three waterboard sessions administered by Mitchell and Jessen. Ms. Haspel was their superior, as chief of base, and according to the CIA’s own description of the chief’s duties, would have authored or authorized the cables to headquarters describing the torture sessions.[13]

According to the documents, the CIA closed the Green site on December 4, 2002 because of the risk of media exposure and ongoing tensions with the host Thai government, in which numerous officials knew of the black site. CIA headquarters ordered the Green site staff to sanitize the base but to preserve the torture videotapes. According to flight records gathered and analyzed by the Rendition Project and the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, the two detainees at the Green site, Nashiri and Zubaydah, were rendered from Thailand to Detention Site Blue, located at Stare Kiejkuty in Poland.[14]

CIA documents cited by the Senate report express a “real concern” on the part of then-CIA general counsel Scott Muller that circa December 2002, “cable traffic reporting was becoming thinner” thus preventing CIA from monitoring the situation.[15]

Classification and redaction still cover key facts in the Gina Haspel torture story.

* Was she still the chief of base when the Green site closed on December 4, 2002?

* Did she supervise the November 27, 2002 waterboarding sessions of Nashiri?

* What was her specific role in perpetuating the false claim that Nashiri’s information had come from torture (what the CIA euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques”) rather than the Dubai interrogations? 

* Did she ever ask any questions about the qualifications and motivations of the contract psychologists, Mitchell and Jessen, to whom the CIA outsourced the entire torture program to the tune of $81 million in contracts? (Apparently not, because they still had their sole source contracts when Ms. Haspel served as chief of staff to the head of the CIA National Clandestine Service in 2005.)

* Did she volunteer, or just accept assignment, to command the Green site starting in October 2002?

* Did she review the cable traffic from the Green site in August 2002 before she took command, in which CIA officers complained about the brutality of the torture of Zubaydah and raised questions about the legality? Was she aware of the complaints?

* Did she ever object to the torture, or express any qualms?

* Did she ever review the CIA cables reporting on the torture sessions, compared to the CIA’s disseminated intelligence and the timing of information collected, to judge whether the claims of torture’s effectiveness were true or false – as the Senate Intelligence Committee did?

* What was her role in reducing the amount of information in cables from the black sites circa December 2002?

Read the Documents: