[Congressional Record Volume 164, Number 74 (Tuesday, May 8, 2018)]
[Senate]
[Pages S2534-S2535]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                       Nomination of Gina Haspel

  Mr. CORNYN. Mr. President, when I was a kid, I used to like to read 
the comics in the newspaper every day. Usually, it was some interesting 
caricature of real life that was particularly funny. Yet the sorts of 
caricatures we have been seeing in the past few days about the 
President's nominee to the CIA are not funny and are not comical at 
all. What we have seen is a gross caricature of this woman's 
distinguished 33-year career. I am talking about Gina Haspel at the 
CIA.

  Our Democratic colleagues are stuck in the past. They are trying to, 
really, tag her with some of the more controversial episodes during the 
aftermath of 9/11. The fact is, that is a caricature of her three 
decades of hard work and service in spanning the globe while working in 
the intelligence community and trying to keep America safe. They, of 
course, need to get their facts straight regarding the episodes they 
complain about. The fact is that they have all been investigated, and 
Gina Haspel has been exonerated. They are wrong to ignore everything 
else she has done in her career, as well as the fact that she will be 
the first woman Director of the Central Intelligence Agency--someone 
enormously popular with the rank and file in her having come from 
within their ranks.
  The particular episodes that we will hear talked about tomorrow at 
the open hearing before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence 
involve enhanced interrogation techniques that were used in isolated 
instances in the days immediately following 9/11. These programs were, 
of course, vetted by all appropriate legal advisors and were depended 
upon in good faith by intelligence officers and the Department of 
Defense. Congressional leaders were briefed on them and had no 
objection because the threat immediately after 9/11 was that al-Qaida 
had been meeting with some Pakistani nuclear scientists, perhaps with 
the objective of getting a nuclear device that they could use to kill 
more Americans and more innocent people. This was, truly, an emergency 
situation, and policymakers were demanding that our military and 
intelligence community do everything they could to prevent another 9/11 
attack.
  It is fundamentally unfair for some to want to change the rules after 
the fact now that we are feeling safe and secure, and it is obscene to 
hold intelligence officials responsible for policy decisions that they 
did not make but which they were charged with executing. We expected 
them to be executed--``we'' being the policymakers in the executive and 
legislative branches.
  I mentioned the declassified 2011 Michael Morell memo yesterday, 
which exonerates Ms. Haspel from this allegation that she somehow 
played a part in destroying videotapes of enhanced interrogation. In 
the memo, Morell, who was then the Acting Director of the CIA, found no 
fault with Ms. Haspel's performance and indicated that she acted 
appropriately in her role as it related to carrying out her 
supervisor's orders. Again, she was not the one who actually destroyed 
the tapes but, rather, acted on her supervisor's instructions to draft 
a cable that she expected to be vetted with the appropriate authorities 
and policymakers within the CIA structure.
  Mr. Morell himself added a statement following the memo's release 
that Ms. Haspel did not destroy the videotapes of the enhanced 
interrogation techniques that were used on post-9/11 detainees. He said 
that she did not oversee their destruction either, and she did not 
order their destruction.
  Nevertheless, I will bet one is going to hear a lot about this at 
tomorrow's hearing before the Senate Intelligence Committee. It is 
unfair to focus on an isolated event in an attempt to try to suggest 
that she acted inappropriately when her supervisors, including the 
Acting Director of the CIA, found no fault with her actions, and any 
allegations that she bore personal responsibility for destroying the 
videotapes have been affirmatively disproven.
  We know from her career timeline that was produced by the CIA that 
Ms. Haspel spoke French and Spanish prior to joining the CIA and 
learned Turkish and Russian. That is interesting because, in fact, we 
can't know a lot in a public setting of some of her classified 
activities as a member of the Central Intelligence Agency. That is the 
nature of the work, that being that intelligence officers willingly 
accept the responsibility to keep classified information secret so as 
not to expose sources and methods that would endanger lives and 
undermine our ability to get intelligence to our policymakers so they 
can make good decisions.
  Clearly, she is a student of languages and cultures around the 
world--exactly the kind of person you would want to lead an agency that 
operates internationally, like the Central Intelligence Agency. We know 
from declassified documents that she had field assignments in Africa 
and Europe in the late eighties and nineties and then went on to become 
station chief at multiple locations before becoming the Deputy Director 
of the CIA. When she worked abroad in the eighties, she encountered 
none other than Mother Teresa and helped arrange a phone call between 
Mother Teresa and President Reagan. Then she visited a local orphanage 
with the famous nun.
  Of course, as I said, we can't talk about all of the details of her 
invaluable years of service here on the Senate floor because much of 
that information remains classified. Indeed, tomorrow, we will have an 
open, declassified setting, followed by a closed, classified setting so 
members of the committee can get answers to their questions. Yet we do 
know about some of the successes that the CIA and the U.S. Government 
achieved during the 30-plus years she served, and some of those are 
worth mentioning here.

[[Page S2535]]

  I am talking, first and foremost, about killing al-Qaida's key 
leaders and undermining the terrorist group's operations. We, of 
course, remember the raid that killed Osama bin Laden 7 years ago, 
which was the culmination of many years of advanced intelligence 
operations by people just like Gina Haspel. The CIA is responsible for 
collecting the dots and then connecting the dots so that policymakers 
can make important decisions, as in President Obama's decision to take 
out Osama bin Laden once he had been located. The CIA and Gina Haspel 
deserve tremendous credit for the indispensable role she and they 
played.
  There are also things like the disruption of Najibullah Zazi's plot 
to bomb the subway in New York in 2009--another major intelligence and 
law enforcement success. An al-Qaida recruit, Zazi trained with the 
group in Pakistan and returned to the United States to build explosives 
for what could have been a devastating attack. According to news 
reports, it was through our intelligence collection efforts that we 
identified Zazi and that he was eventually arrested and convicted. The 
CIA is involved in far more than just counterterrorism operations. It 
deserves credit for all other equally important work, as well, some of 
which Ms. Haspel and her colleagues, undoubtedly, participated in.
  We know the intelligence community targets all aspects of 
international criminal organizations, for example, and, of course, 
there are many more successes that will never see the light of day 
because those wins must be kept secret so that ongoing operations and 
sources that supply information and tactical methods are protected so 
they can remain useful in the future.
  As Jane Harman--a 9-term former Democratic Member of the House of 
Representatives--wrote not long ago:

       The [Intelligence Community] has been the tip of America's 
     spear for decades. Selfless men and women have put their 
     lives on the line--often doing work their families are 
     unaware of--to keep us safe, and they have. Yes, there have 
     been some tragic failures, but far more impressive successes.

  That is from one of our former Democratic colleagues. Her words, of 
course, apply to Ms. Haspel's career as much as they do to any other 
intelligence professional's.
  Ms. Haspel has put her life on the line to keep us safe, not for the 
glory, because most of what she has done has happened undercover in a 
way that does not reveal important sources and methods or expose other 
people to retaliation or attack. When we consider her nomination this 
week, we must see it in the light of all of the CIA's successes, not as 
a caricature and misrepresentation of a couple of events that occurred 
post-9/11. Men and women like her do what they do not because of the 
notoriety. It is just the opposite. They do it because they love their 
country and want to prevent it from harm. Ms. Haspel is no exception, 
and she is deserving of our profound appreciation. To demonstrate that 
appreciation, we need to get her confirmed.