After the firing of former-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and the selection of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as his replacement, President Donald Trump nominated Gina Haspel to take over as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
According to a report by Fox News, Haspel, 61, has served with the CIA since 1985 and has received numerous awards, including the George H. W. Bush Award for excellence in counterterrorism, the Donovan Award, the Intelligence Medal of Merit, and the Presidential Rank Award.
“I am grateful to President Trump for the opportunity, and humbled by his confidence in me, to be nominated to be the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency,” the nominee said in a statement.
Her career includes involvement in covert actions and the nomination has drawn widespread praise, including commendations from John Brennan, Director of the CIA under the Obama Administration. Haspel made history as the agency’s first female Deputy Director and will again mark a milestone as the first woman to run the CIA.
Haspel’s service also included tours as Chief of Station (the CIA’s top officer) in multiple countries and service as Chief of Staff for the CIA director and Deputy Director of the National Clandestine Service. Senator Richard Burr, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, praised the nomination and announced his intention to move for her quick confirmation to the post.
The nomination has drawn a firestorm of protest, with dissenters, including Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden, noting she ran a CIA “black site” and alleging she was involved in torture.
Dr. James Mitchell, an Air Force veteran who got Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a senior member of al-Qaeda, to spill his secrets, sharply disputed the characterization of the “enhanced intelligence” techniques as torture.
“If it was torture, they wouldn’t have to pass a law in 2015 outlawing it because torture is already illegal, right?” Mitchell asked during a December 2016 event at the American Enterprise Institute. “The highest Justice Department in the land wouldn’t have opined five times that it wasn’t torture — one time after I, personally, waterboarded an assistant attorney general before he made that decision three or four days later, right?”