WASHINGTON — Crying and pleading, he told them he couldn't recall the answer to their question.

But the CIA interrogators believed that Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, then 37, was lying. So they strapped him to a board, tilted his head back and poured water into his nose and mouth, inducing the panicked sensation of drowning, according to a declassified CIA cable.

The waterboarding of American soldiers was presented as evidence against Japanese war criminals during World War II. But in 2002, a secret Justice Department opinion — long since repudiated — deemed the technique legal for use by the CIA against al Qaeda. And at a black site prison run by Donald Trump's pick to be the next CIA director, records show, the treatment was applied on three separate occasions to al-Nashiri, an unrepentant al Qaeda terrorist believed to have caused the deaths of 17 American sailors by planning the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole. A psychiatrist who specializes in trauma later said al-Nashiri was one of the most damaged torture victims she had ever examined.

Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri listens during his arraignment at the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba on Nov. 9, 2011. Janet Hamlin / AP file

Gina Haspel, a career CIA operative who was running the base at the time, told senators this week that the CIA on her watch would never brutalize prisoners. But she didn't discuss the torture of al-Nashiri, and she declined, over and over again, to pass any moral or policy judgment on a CIA program that many people view as a significant departure from American values.

"I believe CIA did extraordinary work to prevent another attack with the legal tools we were provided," Haspel responded, when asked repeatedly by Sen. Kamala Harris, a California Democrat, whether she believed the coercive techniques were immoral.

Haspel, lauded by Republicans and revered by many who worked with her at the CIA, appears likely to be confirmed by the Senate. If that happens, it will mark a major defeat for Democrats, human rights groups and others who have for years sought to pursue a moral reckoning over the CIA's use of torture during the George W. Bush administration.

Investigators in a speedboat examine the hull of the USS Cole at the Yemeni port of Aden, after a powerful explosion ripped a hole in the U.S. Navy destroyer, killing at least 17 sailors and injuring 30 others. Dimitri Messinis / AP file

"The defeat would not be that Haspel was confirmed," said Stephen Vladeck, a liberal law professor at the University of Texas who specializes in national security. "The defeat would be her confirmation despite, or perhaps because of, her utter unwillingness to reckon with the CIA's sordid past."

The defeat for torture opponents wouldn't be total. Haspel promised senators that the CIA would never restart any interrogation program on her watch — and that she would not allow the CIA to do things she considered immoral, "even if they were technically legal."

"I support the higher moral standard that this country has decided to hold itself to," Haspel said.

Although torture was already illegal in 2001, she was referring to the fact that Barack Obama banned coercive interrogations by executive order in 2009, and that ban was later codified in law more explicitly than it had been.

Many people, including those who opposed the CIA's harsh interrogations, support Haspel's confirmation on the grounds that she is a well-qualified career spy who could stand up to a president who has expressed doubt about his own intelligence agencies.

"The Senate should consider why so many career officers at the CIA are excited by the prospect of her nomination," wrote Ben Wittes, an MSNBC legal analyst, on his Lawfare blog. "They see her as an important layer of protection between the agency and the president."

But Haspel's confirmation hearing may have been the last chance for the U.S. government to publicly explore the implications of the CIA's dramatic departure from American traditions after 9/11. And that chance was largely missed.

Republicans on the committee, led by Chairman Richard Burr of North Carolina, said repeatedly that they had no interest in discussing the issue. Democrats, hampered by a five-minute limit on questioning, struggled to get answers.

"Ms. Haspel, what the committee must hear is your own view" of the program, Sen. Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat, said at the top of the hearing. "Most importantly, in your view — was the program consistent with American values?"

But Haspel repeatedly avoided answering that question. Nor would she say anything about what she did or what she observed. She did not acknowledge what John Brennan acknowledged when he was CIA director — that some agency officers had not "lived up to the high standards we set for ourselves," referring to a string of abuses that exceeded Justice Department guidelines.

"The part I'm still stunned by is that there was no public accountability, no regret, no remorse whatsoever," said Chris Anders, deputy director of the ACLU's Washington office.

"Haspel is amazing. She really is," tweeted Patrick Skinner, a former CIA counterterrorism operator who now works as a police officer. "She just shouldn't be Director (of the) CIA. At some point we as a nation must say, enough with the 'in the aftermath of 9/11, rules didn't apply.' They did. And they do. They always did and do."

CIA officers and others who support Haspel say it's unfair to treat her nomination as a referendum on the agency's post -9/11 interrogation tactics — which they resist calling torture. They point out that President George Bush ordered the program, his senior aides embraced it, senior Justice Department lawyers wrote memos upholding its legality — and that none of those people have suffered obvious career penalties.

Former CIA officer Doug Wise echoed many of his colleagues when he wrote in the Cipher Brief, "One thing I know, it wasn't Gina's program, and it wasn't the C.I.A.'s program, it was America's program."

But the 528-page executive summary of the 6,000-page Senate torture report, written by Democrats and published in 2014, undercuts the idea that any outsiders had a clear picture of what the agency was doing. It argues that the CIA so thoroughly misrepresented both the nature of the torture and the intelligence gleaned from it that Bush and his aides didn't have important facts.

For example, the detainee Abu Zubyadah was waterboarded 83 times and kept in cramped boxes for nearly 300 hours. In October 2002, the report says, Bush was told via his daily intelligence briefing that Zubaydah was still withholding "significant threat information," even though some CIA officers at the secret prison where he was held wrote in cables that he had been truthful, compliant and cooperative.

When Bush finally acknowledged the program in a 2006 speech, he argued that harsh CIA interrogations had prevented major terror attacks. But CIA records show that the speech was filled with misinformation, and the CIA knew it, but failed to correct the record, according to the Senate report.