emptywheel

"It was CIA who identified and captured Osama bin Laden." SEAL propagandists go nuts!

Haspel answers a different question than Warner asked: whether CIA will restart torture, not whether it was wrong.

"In retrospect it is clear CIA not prepared to conduct detention program." LOLOLOL. Rather than saying it is not legal to torture, she says it is not legal to use techniques not in AFM. VERY curious phrasing.

"CIA cannot be effective w/o people's trust." Hailing Congressional oversight process. Note, in her description of torture she didn't address destroying a video that Congress had asked for.

Gonna interject here: the moment to establish that we can't have torturers lead CIA was actually Brennan, not Haspel. Dems failed that test.

Burr: I would remind members that we are in an open session. Did Burr actually give Wyden the side eye when he asked that?

Burr pitches the video destruction as entirely Rodriguez' decision. "The tape issue had lingered at CIA for a period of about 3 years. A great deal of concern about security risk to CIA officers depicted on tapes."

Haspel: Rodriguez has made it very clear that he and he alone made the decision. I did not appear on those tapes as has been alleged.

Note: the claim this was about protecting officers doesn't make sense for reasons I'll go into later.

Haspel: The official record is the cable record, we use that to detail all our operations. [So why is that not sufficient to do a SSCI report off of? That makes NO SENSE.]

In her description of legal/policy issues behind destroying tapes so far, Haspel hasn't mentioned the active request from Carl Levin for tapes.

Haspel says there was a HPSCI investigation that never produced a report. She says HPSCI Chair found no problem. That's VERY curious given that Pete Hoekstra had a briefing the day of the destruction.