Did the new CIA director nominee allow torture? America needs to come to grips with its past.

We “tortured some folks,” President Barack Obama said in 2014. It was not the euphemistic “enhanced interrogation tactics.” It was torture. When such techniques were used against American POW s, including the years John McCain spent in Vietnam, we called it torture – because that’s what it was. When America used those techniques against others as part of our war on terror, it was still torture.

When our enemies did those things to our soldiers, they often believed they had good reason to do so, to protect their families, their country, their interests – the same rationale used by Americans who defend the awful things we have done.

That’s where the confirmation hearings for Gina Haspel to become the next head of the CIA should begin, with a complete and truthful declaration of how our government treated prisoners, her role in those efforts and whether we should elevate someone who allegedly did things we’d declare war crimes if they had been done by Saddam Hussein. Those acts don’t become less egregious because they were committed by American hands and ordered by American leaders.

We know some of what happened, thanks to a partially declassified Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture. The CIA used “rectal rehydration,” forced feeding through the rectum that left injuries similar to rape; sleep deprivation that kept some detainees awake for up to 180 hours, “wallings,” or slamming detainees against walls, sometimes when they were naked ; and repeated waterboarding that left some detainees unresponsive. And yet, that torture often proved useless or self-defeating, leading to false information that wasted the agency’s time and resources and gave young men in the Middle East reason to become radicalized. We violated our principles to defeat terrorism and ended up creating more terrorists.

The role Haspel, now the CIA’s deputy director, played is in dispute. She headed up a black site where detainees were held, and torture was used; the only question is which detainees were abused under her supervision and how extensive was her involvement. Haspel also was involved in the destruction of evidence, according to numerous reports, which was part of a larger pattern of CIA officials misleading Congress about how frequently the techniques were used and how extreme they were. The Senate committee also found that the agency actively “avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.”

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, we were scared. We didn’t know if there would be another attack, or from where or when. Led by the Bush administration, we gave into our fears. Even after that fear largely subsided, under the direction of President Obama, we moved on, wanting to “look ahead” instead of fully investigating what happened and holding those responsible to account.

Haspel’s nomination provides us another opportunity to right those wrongs. We shouldn’t squander it.

This story was originally published March 21, 2018 at 1:02 PM with the headline "Did the new CIA director nominee allow torture? America needs to come to grips with its past.."