Do the Nuremberg Rules Apply? MORE

Gina Haspel has been named to head the CIA as its current director moves to the State Department. Both must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate.

The Guardian has published an article that reports all that may be publicly known, at this point, about Gina Haspel's role as the CIA officer in charge of a black site prison in Thailand and her role in destroying records thereof.

Let us return to the days when the U.S. government tortured prisoners after 9/11.

In a recent court case, two psychologists, who devised the interrogation methods used at CIA-run black sites, attempted to depose Gina Haspel. The case produced a number of documents redacted, presumably by the CIA, that resulted in her being named as the CIA officer in charge of a site in Thailand.

There seems to have been little curiosity about her when Trump named her deputy director of the CIA early in 2017. Now as Mike Pompeo, the current director, moves on to the State Department, Haspel has been nominated to succeed him. Both must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate. Let's see if the Senate examines the reported role she played.

Among other points in the Guardian story, there is this from the two psychologists:
"She [Gina Haspel] had “direct, first-hand knowledge of the extent of defendants’ involvement in the development of interrogation efforts”, and was “in a position to confirm that defendants never engaged in any interrogation activities that had not been previously and specifically approved in advance by the CIA on a case-by-case basis”.

Of note: in her photo run with the Guardian's story she looks like your mother's best friend.

UpDAte:  Rich Lowry, editor of the National Review writes a defense of Haspel; we are likely to hear more of this kind of argument in the coming weeks.

From Karen Greenberg, director of Fordham Law's Center on National Security and author of books on national security, torture and Abu Ghraib: Gina Haspel's CIA nomination ignores her history of torture and sets a dangerous precedent. NBC 

MORE: A correction of dates when Haspel was in charge of the Thai torture site, Pro Publica.****As far as I can make out the correction does not include claims that she oversaw torture there at a later date and that she later destroyed evidence. Stay tuned for the confirmation hearings, where I am assuming there will be a mudding effort to show that what she did was legal, and that agents like Haspel, and others, were assured by authorities that they were legal. We are going to see a lot of tooing and froing on the legality question (which is, if your boss says so, it's okay). The U.S. didn't accept that from the Germans and Israel didn't accept it from Eichman. So why would it be okay for the GW Bush Administration.