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posted by Fnord666 on Saturday May 19 2018, @06:09PM   Printer-friendly

Veteran spy Gina Haspel will become the first female director of the CIA after six Democrats joined Republicans in a Senate confirmation vote that overrode concerns about her role in the spy agency's harsh interrogation program after 9/11.

Thursday's 54-45 vote split both parties, and the margin was the closest for a CIA nominee in the nearly seven decades that a nod from the Senate has been required. Haspel, who has spent nearly all of her 33-year CIA career in undercover positions, is the first career operations officer to be confirmed since William Colby in 1973.

Haspel, 61, is a native of Kentucky but grew up around the world as the daughter of an Air Force serviceman. She worked in Africa, Europe and classified locations around the globe and was tapped as deputy director of the CIA last year.

Source: Fox News

Also at the New York Times, CNN[warning: autoplay video], and Vox among others.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:28PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 19 2018, @10:28PM (#681686)
    Waterboarding Used to Be a Crime [washingtonpost.com]

    After Japan surrendered, the United States organized and participated in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, generally called the Tokyo War Crimes Trials. Leading members of Japan's military and government elite were charged, among their many other crimes, with torturing Allied military personnel and civilians. The principal proof upon which their torture convictions were based was conduct that we would now call waterboarding.

    Bobby Scott: After WWII U.S. executed Japanese for war crimes including waterboarding [politifact.com]

    Yuma Totani, a history professor at the University of Hawaii, said she knows of two additional Japanese officers who were executed after U.S. military trials conducted from 1944 to 1946. "Both accused were found guilty on grounds that they disregarded their duty to take control of subordinate army units, which included kenpeitai (Japanese secret police) that was known to have used various torture methods against detainees at Fort Santiago, the kenpeitai interrogation center at Manila," Totani said in an email. "Waterboarding being one of the commonplace torture methods of kenpeitai, one could argue that these accused were convicted of a charge that included waterboarding as one of the torture methods, commonly applied by the members of their subordinate army units."

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