We’re on the brink of a full-throttled return to officially sanctioned US torture. Our impulsive president has said he wants to bring back waterboarding “and a hell of a lot worse” and has now named Gina Haspel as the new CIA chief. Haspel personally oversaw torture at a CIA black site in Thailand, and she even seemed to relish the role.

Haspel also oversaw George W Bush’s rendition to torture program and, unsurprisingly, many in the intelligence community that are connected to the US torture program are now leaping to her defense, saying that she shouldn’t be penalized now for just following orders back then.



Former CIA Director John Brennan, who supported rendition to torture and famously said, “we do have to take the gloves off in some areas,” this week vouched for Haspel’s “integrity” and told an interviewer, “don’t forget that the detention-interrogation program was authorized by the president of the United States and deemed lawful by the Department of Justice.”



Former CIA chief General Michael Hayden said in defense of Haspel, that she did “simply everything that the agency, the agency’s directors and the nation asked her to do.”

While it is certainly not unusual for people who’ve overseen and participated in crimes against humanity like torture and genocide to be recast by their supporters as dutiful public servants, there are, in addition, two deeply disturbing trends – one old, one new – embedded both in the naming of Haspel to the position and her defenders’ characterizations of her.



Torture is illegal under US and international law in all circumstances, and human rights organizations like mine have been strongly pushing for those who ordered or committed torture after 9/11 – including the president – to be held accountable in US and international courts.



Yet Haspel’s defenders are loathe to admit that the practice she participated in was concerning, much less illegal. So defending Haspel as a duty-bound functionary when it comes to torture but a vibrant leader with great integrity when it comes to everything else seeks to erase the illegality and the depravity of the practice of torture as well as the well-deserved disgrace that must always travel with those who have practiced it.



But beyond that, there is another, more current problem, and that is the president himself. Trump, who is lining up with authoritarian rulers and tin-pot dictators around the world, has no use for the rule of law. He is impulsive, reckless, and astonishingly self-focused. A very healthy subset of high-level White House staff have been running for the exits when he’s not looking, precisely because they recognize that he demands fealty to whim rather than to the national good.



He is known for firing people because they contradict his social media exhortations. Given that our nation is being run by Donald J Trump, at least for the time being, the very last thing we need is a CIA chief who dutifully implements everything that this president authorizes. In fact, we need the exact opposite. Someone who opposes torture, doesn’t have running a torture program on their resume, and who will say no to the president when, as seems to be the case daily, he gets an urge to make his mark on the news cycle.

It is true that people who say no to Donald Trump don’t stay in their jobs for long regardless of whether they’re seen as enablers or stabilizing forces in his administration. But when it comes to dutiful public servants in the Trump administration, history will look kindly upon those who said no and were fired and those who said no and left under their own steam.



The unsung heroes of the age will be those who said no to a Trump administration job offer in the first place. But Gina Haspel will not be in that number because of her horrific record. The Center for Constitutional Rights recently submitted a filing with the International Criminal Court that brought Haspel to their attention. We wanted to highlight her impunity for torture and the heightened risk for a return to torture given her position as deputy CIA director.



Impunity breeds repetition. We will be following up with The Hague. Meanwhile, the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has called for her arrest in connection with a German investigation into US torture under Bush.

For those who were tortured in the CIA program she oversaw, that harm is remains present today. They are still at Guantanamo and have had no justice, no care, and no redress. Gina Haspel should be arrested, not promoted, and the Senate, if it has a single shred of respect left for the law, should not confirm her.

