A few things bother me about Gina Haspel that I don't see getting any play in the news. First is the stupidity of many of her answers. Yes, stupidity. She appears to be a profoundly stupid person.
“I’m not going to sit here, with the benefit of hindsight, and judge the very good people who made hard decisions, who were running the agency in very extraordinary circumstances,” she told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
She's applying for the job of Director. It is literally part of the job to judge what works & what doesn't, to judge what needs to be done to correct things when a line of work is unsuccessful. A very important part of the job. And she straight up says she's not doing it. Stupid.
She lacks any nuanced vocabulary for it. For her, 'judging them' means throwing them under the bus & betraying them. The only other option is to ignore it, write it off as 'bad times.' That's a city police sergeant, not a senior executive of a major federal agency. Stupid.
And of course it doesn't take much scrutiny to see that's probably because she is among the most culpable. If something is wrong with 'those people' then something is wrong with her, and that brings us to my next problem: narcissism.
“From my first days in training, I had a knack for the nuts and bolts of my profession,” she said. “I excelled in finding and acquiring secret information that I obtained in brush passes, dead drops or in meetings in dusty alleys of third-world capitals.”
That is a ridiculous thing for an adult to say about herself in front of Congress. Are you writing an airport bookstore novel about yourself, or are you applying for a serious job? I'm not clear. She's in love with an image of herself that she wants you to see and love as well.
“After 9/11, I didn’t look to go sit on the Swiss desk — I stepped up,” she said. “I was not on the sidelines. I was on the front lines in the Cold War, and I was on the front lines in the fight against Al Qaeda.”
No, ma'am. I do not believe you were, according to the bio your agency provided for you. Al Qa'ida had actual foot soldiers, on actual lines, and they actually shot at us. You were running intelligence operations from embassies and black sites. There's a difference.
She means to distinguish herself from intelligence professionals who believed themselves to be 'too good' to work terrorism. Who preferred to stay on the wine and cheese circuit after 9/11. And she would be right, that she did the right thing initially by stepping up.
But a fireman who throws gasoline into a burning apartment doesn't get credit for 'stepping up' and being a fireman. Whether we worship you after the fact depends on what you did when you stepped up. And Gina Haspel ran a torture house. She supervised torture.
It was her job to monitor the work of torturers, get them what they needed to do their torture jobs, report the results of their torture work back up the chain, write evals for her torturers, and to put herself and her torturers in for awards and such. 'Stepping up' that ain't.
That's both stupidity and narcissism at once.
“I would not put C.I.A. officers at risk by asking them to undertake risky, controversial activity again,” she said, adding: “I would not allow C.I.A. to undertake activity that I thought was immoral, even if it was technically legal. I would absolutely not permit it.”
This statement is clearly ridiculous. Much of what law enforcement and intelligence agencies do, especially intelligence agencies, can only be defined as moral after considerable intellectual gyrations. Ends-justifying-means kind of gyrations.
She's already shown she has no talent for discussing those gyrations. She tortured because she was allowed to torture. That's it. If she'd done any research at all on how to make her unit as effective as possible, she would have had them rely on rapport-based techniques.
But it's clear that she was told she was running a torture house, and her answer was something along the lines of "okay guys, let's step up and do some torture here." That is stupid. It is not indicative of a person who thinks hard about how to accomplish the larger mission.
And my final jag on her narcissism, if I was a Senator, asking questions, would be crafted thus:
"Ms Haspel, bear with me for a few minutes as we work through this. You are a highly experienced, highly trained intelligence officer. Your work has involved many different facets
"Ms Haspel, bear with me for a few minutes as we work through this. You are a highly experienced, highly trained intelligence officer. Your work has involved many different facets
of intelligence work. To do that work, you have to recognize the importance of messaging. That the world's perceptions of us impact the effectiveness of all of our lines of work. Now, you have repeatedly put yourself forward as the most qualified person for this job. And let us
be unflinchingly honest for a moment, for the good of the country. Your reputation is that of a torturer. Your reputation is that of a person who did immoral, ineffective, and damaging things simply because you were allowed to. That is your entire reputation.
Now, if you are appointed to this job, it will be a messaging catastrophe, both for the country and for CIA internally, as intelligence officers see that the way to the top is to disregard any considerations of mission accomplishment, legality, or national interest, and simply
to 'step up' to do the filthiest, least intelligent, and most fashionable work of the day. So, I have two questions: first, how can you reconcile your claimed status as a unique intelligence officer savant with your desire to get this job and deal such a blow to the nation?
And second, if you are the most highly qualified person within CIA for this job, then CIA must, I repeat must, currently be in a state of crisis we've never seen before. Why is the agency in such a crisis state, and as director, what would you do to fix it?
