senate confirmations
Trump's CIA pick Gina Haspel to testify she wouldn't bring back waterboarding
During her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday, President Trump's pick to lead the CIA, Gina Haspel, plans on testifying that she will not reinstate waterboarding as a means of gathering intelligence.
Haspel has spent more than 30 years with the CIA, and she's under scrutiny for her work in 2002 at a "black site" in Thailand where terrorism suspects were waterboarded, as well as a 2005 cable where she wrote that videos showing waterboarding should be destroyed. The CIA has not released any details regarding her role at the prison.
In her prepared remarks, Haspel plans on calling the post-9/11 era "a tumultuous time," NPR reports, and she will offer her "personal commitment, clearly and without reservation that under my leadership CIA will not restart such a detention and interrogation program."