Correction- March 19, 2018: This column refers to information previously published by Pro Publica and the New Yorker regarding Gina Haspel’s role in torture at a secret site in Thailand. ProPublica has since issued a detailed correction and retracted its report regarding the torture of Abu Zubaydah. While Haspel oversaw the Thailand site when Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was tortured there, she did not supervise the torture of Abu Zubaydah nor did she mock his suffering. Pro Publica, which first reported on Zubaydah's torture last year, now states that Haspel was not in charge of the base until after Zubaydah's torture was past. The CIA had not previously responded in detail to these allegations. As reported in the Star on March 17, a number of news organizations have now issued corrections regarding this misinformation.

The new CIA director, Gina Haspel, is a torturer. Her office skill set includes overseeing torture and taunting victims as they lie gasping and near death. President Trump is revving up Big Torture again.

The consequences will be bloody generally, will cause American captives to be tortured, destroy whatever international goodwill the U.S. had left, and lead to awkward comparisons with other regimes that tortured: Argentina’s generals, Pinochet’s Chile, Hitler’s Germany, Duterte’s Philippines, Putin’s Russia, Japan during the Second World War. The U.S. executed Japanese soldiers for doing to prisoners what the U.S. does now in a fragile peacetime.

The American Civil Liberties Union calls Haspel “the central figure in one of the most illegal and shameful chapters in modern American history.” Edward Snowden notes she might not be able to travel to the EU, given that an ongoing human rights complaint to Germany’s federal prosecutor might mean her arrest.

But former CIA director John Brennan says, “She has tried to carry out her duties at the CIA to the best of her ability, even when the CIA was asked to do some very difficult things in very challenging times.” What a spectacular display of euphemisms. Each one is an orchid.

At a time when the Trump administration should be offering more than token solidarity to Britain after alleged Russian poisonings on British soil (another Russian exile was found dead in London on Monday), the headlines are huge, perhaps by intention to distract from Trump electoral downturns.

The appointment of Haspel’s former CIA boss, torture-supporting Mike Pompeo, as Secretary of State has put the U.S. on the wrong side of international law, even on the wrong side of human decency, however distant that marker may currently be.

It need not have happened. Had President Obama prosecuted Haspel and other CIA torturers at the time, she would have gone to prison. But Obama, in his quaint timid way, said he wanted to look forward, not back. Now the past returns. The past has that tendency.

As ProPublica reported in 2017 after Haspel became CIA deputy director, she had years before sat in cells in a black site in Thailand and watched suspects waterboarded until they were so filled with fluid that it bubbled up from inside them. She mocked them. She watched Abu Zubaydah being tortured and said to him, “Good job! I like the way you’re drooling: it adds realism. I’m almost buying it. You wouldn’t think a grown man would do that.”

Haspel was in charge of CIA torture for three years, starting in 2002, as the New Yorker has reported. She ran the R.D.I. program, Rendition, Detention and Interrogation.

We know specifically about two suspects whose torture she oversaw in 2002, Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, both of them still in Guantanamo. They were medically revived for more torture, vomited, passed out and urinated on themselves, were stripped, placed in “small confinement boxes” which is management jargon for coffins, slammed against walls, drugged, gagged and blindfolded and flown from one rendition site to another.

Nashiri suffered rectal feeding and mock executions with a power drill and gun. Along the way, Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times, lost an eye. These things happen.

The interrogations were videotaped, for reasons that beggar understanding. In 2005, after journalists began asking questions, she co-signed off on privately destroying the tapes. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence was outraged to discover this. That was then. What atrocities will Haspel’s CIA commit now?

There is an irony here. Trump does not appoint women unless they are linked to those who helped fund his presidential campaign (Betsy DeVos) or married to allies (Elaine Chao) or are related to him (Ivanka Trump). Haspel is unique. She made it on her own.

Is this Trump being spiteful? As former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich tweeted Monday, “Does Trump’s brain know what’s going on in Trump’s gut?” Trump boasted in his tweet that Haspel will be the first female CIA director but surely her distinction lies in her bloody interlude.

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I suppose this is a backhanded triumph for feminism. Women have their monsters too — who ever thought otherwise — but rarely have they been so rewarded.

hmallick@thestar.ca