Executive Session

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, in December 2012, the legendary Senator from Hawaii, Daniel Inouye, passed away. He was the longtime chairman and vice chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee.

By a twist of fate, I succeeded him in that role, and one of the most notable surprises to me was how much of the funding for the intelligence community came with that responsibility.

Together with my earlier service on the Senate Intelligence Committee, I have learned that oversight of the secret agencies of our government is one of the most challenging and important roles of Congress.

It is a difficult task. Many of the issues involved in overseeing the CIA and other agencies are highly technical. Some issues present extraordinary challenges, where the security of our Nation must be balanced with the best interests of the American people. All of these matters are blanketed by the highest degree of secrecy.

Despite all of these oversight challenges, there are issues that are simply black and white. The starkest of these issues in the last two decades was the CIA's program to torture detainees at black sites throughout the world after 9/11.

After 9/11, many Americans thought long and hard about whether to torture terrorists to gain information to stop the next catastrophic attack. Implicit in that moral question is the assumption that we would capture the right people who might have essential intelligence to save American lives.

Last week, the New York Times published an article by a Libyan woman who says she was detained at a black site in Thailand.

Her story details how she and her husband were taken by masked men to a windowless room in Thailand. When moved, she was bound to a stretcher. She was deprived of sleep. She was struck in the abdomen.

The Bush administration used the euphemism ``enhanced interrogation techniques'' to describe this kind of abuse. Despite their words, this was torture, plain and simple.

The Libyan woman was halfway through a pregnancy at the time. She was then sent to Libya, where she spent weeks in another prison, with a crib in the room, as though she was being mocked for being with child. Her baby was born just after her release.

Last week, the highest levels of the British Government formally apologized for its role in the detention and treatment of her and her husband. No such apology has been forthcoming from the United States.

To understand the full dimensions of the CIA's so-called enhanced interrogation techniques is a difficult task. I commend Senator Feinstein and her staff for an exhaustive report, years in the making, that explains this torture program in great detail. The stress positions, the sleep deprivation, the ``walling,'' the slapping, and the waterboarding, it is all in there, unclassified, for the public to see.

Simply informing the public about what happened is not sufficient. These sad chapters in American history cannot be closed until there is accountability.

The nominee for the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, exercised a series of leadership positions that involved the CIA's use of these torture techniques. She was in a position to do something about it, had she believed this torture was wrong.

I note that many of her current and former colleagues have endorsed her nomination. They have spoken about her capabilities and effectiveness in positive terms. I do not know how many of them have a detailed understanding of her role in the CIA's torture program.

I met with Ms. Haspel at length and read documents that detailed her role in the torture program. She stated to me that, as a CIA officer, she had been advised by all the appropriate legal authorities that she could carry out her assigned duties and remain within the law.

That may be the case, but that does not explain how a person can see an individual be subjected to waterboarding, and the excruciating feeling that they are going to drown, and not question whether that legal guidance is just. Simply labelling conduct ``legal'' doesn't make it right.

In fact, we now know that the Bush administration twisted the law in its infamous torture report to justify the use of torture. The Justice Department's legal analysis was informed by false information from the CIA that techniques like waterboarding helped obtain lifesaving information that was otherwise unavailable.

But the decisive issue as to this nominee is much simpler.

The destruction of videotapes of those interrogation sessions remains an act that is impossible to justify or ignore.

The CIA has provided documents for the review of all Senators that attempt to exonerate Ms. Haspel in the destruction of those tapes.

On December 7, 2007, the day after the destruction of these tapes was first reported, I asked then-Attorney General Michael Mukasey to open a criminal investigation into the destruction of the tapes. This led to the so-called Durham investigation, led by Federal prosecutor John Durham.

Approximately 2 weeks ago, the Department of Justice for the first time provided only certain Members of the Senate with the results of that investigation, called the Durham Report. Few Senators even know that this report exists.

I am the vice chairman of the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee, which funds the CIA, and a senior member of the Judiciary Committee, which has jurisdiction over the Justice Department. I have asked to review the Durham Report, but the Trump administration has refused.

What does this report conclude? Does it have information that was not available during other reviews? The vast majority of Senators and the American public will never know before the vote is called on this nomination.

We have seen the CIA, which is tasked with providing intelligence, take a strong stand in favor of this nomination. I do not question the right of the administration to push for their appointees. But I do question whether our intelligence community is compromising its objectivity in lobbying the public in favor of the nomination. Given the secrecy over the Durham Report, I can only wonder if we are being told just one side of the story.

I continue to believe that the best interest of our Nation, our Government, and the CIA is to make a clean break from the odious history of torture.

In my time overseeing the CIA, I know that there are many experienced professionals, both inside the intelligence community and outside of it, that are able to lead this agency with great skill and without the history of association with waterboarding.

It is impossible to consider this nomination without thinking of our friend and colleague Senator John McCain.

Senator McCain is an American hero. He survived horrific torture as a POW in Vietnam and since then has spent almost five decades in honorable public service to the country he loves dearly.

While Gina Haspel was accommodating and covering up the torture program, Senator McCain was the first prominent Republican to speak out against this program, which was created by an administration of his own political party.

I was proud to work closely with Senator McCain on what has rightly become known as the McCain torture amendment, which made it clear that torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment are absolutely prohibited in America--no exceptions.

That amendment passed this body on an overwhelming 90-9 vote, despite a veto threat from the Bush administration.

Now, in the twilight of a great American life, Senator McCain has again spoken out against an administration of his own political party, urging us to oppose this nomination because of the nominee's complicity in torture. For that principled stand, Senator McCain has been subjected to crass insults by an administration that doesn't have the decency to properly and publicly apologize to the McCain family.

Ultimately, America's strength and influence abroad rests not just with its military might, but also with the power of its ideas and values, of which torture is the ultimate betrayal.

For these reasons, I oppose the nomination of Gina Haspel.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source