Executive Session

Floor Speech

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Mr. WYDEN. Mr. President, as the Senate moves to vote on the nomination to head the CIA, here is the bottom line. While the American people have been told that Gina Haspel likes Johnny Cash and talked to Mother Teresa, Ms. Haspel has been exercising the unprecedented power to personally censor any facts about her that might get in the way of her nomination.

When the Senate votes on a nomination when all the relevant information is, by design, kept secret, how is this any different than a coverup? I regret to have to say that the surrender of the Senate's responsibility to conduct real oversight of this nominee means that Gina Haspel has been given a pass on all the most important and the most relevant issues.

I am going to start with three.

The first is this: What was her opinion about the CIA's torture program when it was happening?

The Washington Post newspaper reported that unnamed officials were pushing back against accusations that she has supported torture.

Now, Ms. Haspel said she learned about the program in 2002. I believe it is especially important to know what her views were later, between 2005 and 2007, when the CIA itself was winding the program down. At that time, did Ms. Haspel call for the program to be continued or expanded? I asked her that in an open intelligence meeting. She did not come close to answering that crucial question.

No. 2, what was her role in the destruction of the torture tapes? The nominee's story here is riddled with holes, and key facts have been covered up.

One matter that we know about is that her boss at the time, Mr. Jose Rodriguez, has publicly contradicted her account of the handling of the destruction of the torture tapes to a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

No. 3, how can the Senate possibly take seriously Ms. Haspel's confirmation conversion on torture that was submitted on the eve of a crucial vote?

There has been a lot of reporting in the press saying that she personally played a role in the CIA torture program. The American people deserve to know whether those reports are true. Every single material question to her about them has been met with stonewalling and evasion. Instead of real responses, Ms. Haspel offered possibly the latest confirmation conversion in history, 16 years after she first learned about the torture program and only just before a vote on her confirmation.

Over and over again, I and other Senators have insisted that Ms. Haspel declassify information about her background that would not in any way compromise the safety of the American people. This is information that is directly relevant to her nomination. In the language of the Intelligence Community--I have read it--the overwhelming bulk of this information can be declassified without compromising sources and methods. Yet every single time a Senator pushed for declassification, Gina Haspel said no. Despite our repeated requests, she decided she would not allow the American people to know who she is and what she has done.

This has been--and, again, it is painful to have to say this--a stark failure of Senate oversight, and it is about as flagrant an example as I have ever seen. The Senate should have stood up to this self-serving abuse of power, but it did not.

For me, it is democracy 101 that confirmations are not supposed to take place in secret. Nominees don't get to decide what is known about them. Yet this core principle--core principle of our democracy has just been chucked in the trash. Instead of standing up for the Constitution and for the American people, the Senate could be rewarding Gina Haspel and the CIA for this extraordinary and self-serving abuse of power.

With respect to other issues, it is important to note that the Agency--again, under the direction of Ms. Haspel--has also conducted an unprecedented influence campaign to promote her confirmation. This, too, is wrong. The CIA, like every government agency, works for the American people. It is not supposed to use its enormous power to serve the personal interests of whoever is running it. The classification rules are there for national security. They are not there for the political security of an individual. They are there to protect the dedicated women and men who undertake dangerous missions undercover. They are not there to shield a nominee for a Senate-confirmed job from scrutiny.

I and a number of my colleagues have looked at the classified information about Ms. Haspel and have concluded it can be released to the public without compromising sources and methods. We asked how she could justify keeping it secret. Her answer almost always is, that is how ``we always protect our officers.''

I want people to understand what is wrong with that statement. Of course, the CIA must protect undercover CIA officers. I don't take a backseat to anybody in this Chamber for protecting those people who are undercover. In fact, I wrote a law, along with Senator Bond, our former colleague, increasing the penalty for outing people who are undercover. Gina Haspel is not undercover. She is asking the U.S. Senate to be vested with a position that would make her one of the most public and visible intelligence leaders in the world.

This is not an undercover job. It is one of the most visible national security positions, not just in our country but in the world. It ought to be accompanied by accountability, and hiding behind the protections that are rightly given undercover officers to advance her career I find absurd.

I wish to also note that her classification decisions are in violation of Executive Order No. 13526. For decades, the intelligence community has been barred from keeping information classified to prevent embarrassment or conceal violations of law or administrative error. It is pretty clear those rules are not high up on Ms. Haspel's priority list.

What I am especially worried about--I am going to go into this--is that if you can violate the classification rules to get confirmed, the Senate says: Oh, no big deal, it is going to get done again and again.

Last time I looked, most Americans believed this country needs more accountability, more transparency, and less unnecessary secrecy.

Much of the attention on the nomination has been about the press reports of Ms. Haspel's role in the CIA torture program. Throughout the process, she has flatout refused to confirm or deny if she had any connection to it. How can this possibly be classified? Three years ago, the Senate Intelligence Committee released a 500-page executive summary of the torture report. The CIA released a long and detailed response. What the CIA did to all those detainees is now officially declassified. Former CIA officers have written whole books about it. How in the world can you say Ms. Haspel's reported involvement in the program is classified? You can do it because she says so, and she is the boss.

At one point, I asked Ms. Haspel whether opinions about the CIA torture program expressed by CIA officers were classified. I wasn't even asking then about anyone's involvement in the program, just what people might have thought about it. Ms. Haspel wouldn't answer that question either. She said that even the matter of whether those opinions are classified is itself classified--downright Orwellian, in my view.

In a democracy, there have to be some basic rules about what is and what isn't classified. We are seeing a replacement of those rules with essentially the whims of leaders who aren't accountable. Secret law-- the classification of legal interpretations rather than sources and methods--is a serious problem, including at Ms. Haspel's CIA. Information that doesn't need to be classified to protect national security is being covered up for political purposes.

Speaking of Orwell, the classification rules themselves are going to be classified. I have been concerned about this tendency for years. I want to emphasize, I have made this clear to political leaders of both political parties, and I continue to believe that. But if the CIA and Ms. Haspel can get away with all this, the worst is yet to come.

As I have been saying since she was nominated, I have a host of concerns about all of these issues. I hope Senators will exercise independent judgment. There is a classified Intelligence Committee minority memo about Ms. Haspel, and I hope every Senator will read it and ask themselves publicly, ``If the American people actually knew about all this, how would I vote?''

What I can say is, her classified comments about her background have been as troubling as her public testimony. What I can say is, when I did get unclassified responses to my questions, they certainly were not assuring. Public discussions about the CIA have generally been about overseas operations affecting foreigners. It has been decades since the public really focused on the danger that the CIA could violate the privacy of Americans, but the danger is there, and hard questions ought to be asked.

One example is section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, recently reauthorized by the Congress. The CIA has the authority, under that law, to identify foreign targets and then to search through the communications of those targets for particular Americans. The CIA can conduct these backdoor searches of Americans without a warrant. That creates a danger of reverse targeting, which is when the government, in this case the CIA, targets a foreigner to find out what an American is saying.

One way to help prevent reverse targeting is to recognize that when the government is conducting lots of backdoor searches on Americans and then sending around reports on those Americans, maybe it is the Americans whom the government is really interested in. By the way, the privacy board agrees with it, and so does the current Assistant Attorney General for National Security.

Given all that--the prospect of what it would mean for Americans--I asked Ms. Haspel about it. Again, what I got back were plenty of words but nothing that provided any assurance that the CIA has any system at all for guarding against reverse targeting of Americans under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Also, the Agency collects a lot of intelligence under an Executive Order known as 12333. I wanted to know if the Agency was conducting backdoor searches on Americans through that data. The current Director of the National Security Agency told me that when the NSA conducts searches of Americans, those searches have to be approved on a case-by- case basis, with probable cause, by the Attorney General. The NSA doesn't actually have to go to court, which is a concern. But those requirements create meaningful hurdles to abuse. I thought it was important to ask about the CIA: When can the CIA conduct backdoor searches of Americans?

The response I got from Ms. Haspel is that the searches are authorized if they are designed to get information related to the CIA's activities. That means there is no standard at all on backdoor searches of Americans.

I have mentioned these two unclassified examples because they show how vague the rules are and how easily the CIA could violate the privacy of Americans. That is why it is important to have leaders at the Agency who believe in the privacy of the American people and who are committed to protecting it, protecting Americans--protecting Americans even if sometimes a lawyer says something might be technically legal. I don't believe Gina Haspel will be that kind of leader.

Before I wrap up, there are a couple of other matters with respect to the torture program. I mentioned that since the torture program has been largely declassified, it can be discussed openly. Senator McCain, whom we admire so much, said last week that Ms. Haspel's refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying. I am going to talk a bit more about Senator McCain before I wrap up. I have always been a John McCain guy on a lot of issues. I came to the Senate and joined the Commerce Committee that he chaired, and I will talk a little about that, but he sure sums it up right on torture. He says: It is wrong. It harms America because of the statement it makes about American values around the world. Then he points out it is not effective.

Since the program has been largely declassified, it can be discussed openly. The CIA captured innocent people. It tortured dozens of detainees. It didn't just waterboard people. The CIA placed detainees in ice water. It kept them awake for a week. It stuffed detainees in small boxes. The list goes on and on. They were always worse than how they were described to Congress or the Department of Justice.

Through it all, it seemed that the CIA and the government had not really held anybody accountable. The CIA also provided numerous false claims to the Department of Justice, to Congress, and to everybody else about torture.

Now, I have never been a big believer in confirmation conversions. My general take is that nominees will say about anything to get confirmed, but Ms. Haspel's statement with respect to torture has to be the most delayed and the most grudging confirmation conversion in history. She said she learned about the torture program in 2002. It took 16 years before she was willing to say anything critical about it.

I mentioned asking her about her views when the program was winding down. That was not something that was a debatable proposition, as it was in public source materials. The CIA was winding down the program. It was capturing fewer people and no longer using the waterboarding.

So what were her views on the program? I asked her specifically because it was in public sources. When the Agency was winding down the program, was she for continuing it or even expanding it? I asked her twice--in the hearing and in a written question. Her quote was that she was ``committed.'' Figure out what that means. To me, that is about as clear an evasion of a very important issue as I can find.

Apropos of the present, usually nominees offer their confirmation conversions before the eve of the key vote. I had mentioned that this was awfully grudging. The Agency shouldn't have undertaken a torture program, she said, because it did damage our officers and our standing in the world.

That is true, but at no time did she ever express regret or anything that reflected that this was just plain wrong. She offered up the classic Washington, almost nonapology. She was not sorry for what the Agency did. She was just not happy with how it was perceived.

Worse still are some of the justifications for the torture program that she is still providing. For example, she is still arguing that the program produced valuable intelligence. She says it is unknowable whether the torture techniques produced valuable intelligence.

Yet it is knowable. The intelligence that the CIA attributed to torture came from other sources. When the committee looked at the CIA's own records, it found that key intelligence was provided by detainees before the CIA engaged in the torture. It is these kinds of documented facts that have made Ms. Haspel's statements so troubling.

Why are her equivocations about the effectiveness of torture so important? I think we all remember the campaign in the fall of 2016, when then-Candidate Trump said: ``Torture works.'' It seems to me that it is not in America's interest to have a CIA Director who responds with: Well, there are a lot of aspects to the issue, and I am not happy about how the Agency was perceived in terms of what it did.

With regard to John McCain, like a lot of Senators, I am thinking now about some of the big battles and tough fights that we had a chance to work on together. I became Oregon's first new Senator in almost 30 years. Oregon has always been about wood products, and it always will be. I said I would go to the Senate and fight like crazy to get more jobs to those rural areas and try to get Oregon and our country into some new fields.

It is not generally known, but in those days, John McCain had just become the chairman of the Commerce Committee.

I went to him, and I asked: Mr. Chairman, why don't you and Chairman Leahy, who has been a stalwart on these issues, lead an effort to try to write the rules of the road for the internet?

By and large, there were not any.

He kind of smiled at me--that quintessential John McCain smile--and basically said: Why don't you go out and figure out how to do it, and we will have a hell of a good time in making the case.

Under John McCain's leadership, what we did was to, in fact, write the rules of the road for 10,000 taxing jurisdictions in America. As a result of those early days, you can't discriminate against electronic commerce, which would have clobbered the internet with thousands of discriminatory decisions. There were digital signatures. We wrote the regulatory rules for social media that are often cited as creating $1 trillion worth of wealth in the private economy.

To a great extent, John McCain brought his typical passion to those new areas that he would be the first to say he didn't know everything about, but he said: Hey, look, we ought to do something that is in America's interest.

We didn't care about Democrats, and we didn't care about Republicans.

As Senators proceed to this vote in a half hour--a historic vote, in my opinion--I hope they will reflect on what John McCain has had to say about torture. He has said Ms. Haspel's refusal to acknowledge torture's immorality is disqualifying. John McCain has urged the Senate to reject her nomination.

John McCain has been a towering authority on this issue and has been a guiding light for the Senate on national security policy. I also just mentioned something I don't think anybody knew, which is about writing the rules of the road for the internet.

It is my hope that John McCain's powerful and unimpeachable views on the issue of torture and this nominee will continue to be heard today and well into the future. There is no greater voice on this subject than John McCain's.

I want him to know how grateful I am for his leadership on this and how, in the days ahead, I look forward to, hopefully, being able to tell my grandchildren what a man of stature and public service really brought to the Senate. I hope Senators will reflect on that before they vote.

Throughout this nomination process, there were not a whole lot of topics that were declassified. So I am just going to share a story about Ms. Haspel and the destruction of the videotapes.

There is important information in the report by U.S. Attorney John Durham that most Senators were not allowed to see. Like everything else about her career, the information that reflects poorly on Ms. Haspel gets covered up, but we did learn some things about Ms. Haspel and the destruction of the torture videotapes. For one, she wrote the cable that authorized the destruction. Second, she was an advocate for destroying the tapes and was involved in what former Acting Director Mike Morell called ``efforts to press for and facilitate a resolution of the matter.'' That is a lot more than drafting a cable.

Especially problematic for Ms. Haspel and her boss, Jose Rodriguez, is that there were reservations or there was even outright opposition from the White House, the head of national intelligence, the CIA, and the Congress to the destruction of the tapes. So Mr. Rodriguez decided to go it alone and sent the cable Ms. Haspel had drafted without telling the lawyers, the CIA Director, or anyone else.

Here is where Ms. Haspel's story about the destruction of the tapes really runs into trouble. Jose Rodriguez, her boss, gave an interview in which he told Ms. Haspel in advance that he was planning on sending the cable without seeking authorization. So I asked her about that story. She denied it. I don't know who is telling the truth. Yet here we are, voting on this nominee without our having this direct contradiction in any way resolved.

Then there is the question of what happened after the cable was sent but before the tapes were actually destroyed. Ms. Haspel has said that she was at her desk and could see her computer screen. So it was shortly after the cable was sent that she became aware of it. She said it was at that point that she walked over to discuss it with Mr. Rodriguez.

So what did she do? She knew that the destruction of evidence had been ordered over everyone's objections. Did she intervene to stop the destruction before it happened? Did she tell the lawyers in time for them to intervene? Did she tell the White House? Did she tell the head of national intelligence? Did she just let it happen?

These are central questions because they tell us what kind of leader Ms. Haspel is. In order to get confirmed, she has made all kinds of promises about standing up for what is right and rejecting inappropriate orders. But what did she do when she knew an order had been sent to destroy evidence over the objections of lawyers and everybody else? There is no record of her doing anything to stop it.

I offer this small window into her background because, I think, we all ought to be asking how might she react when confronted with an illegal, immoral, or inappropriate direction.

I mentioned what the President said earlier in the campaign--that he would bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding. He has praised Ms. Haspel for being tough on terror. You don't have to be Picasso to connect the dots about what the dangers are here. Other than a few belated promises that were made to get confirmed, what evidence is there, actually, to suggest that Ms. Haspel would really push back?

I close, simply, with this. I have an enormous amount of respect for the good work being done by those at the CIA. The nature of the secret, risk-taking work that they do is an extraordinary service to the American people. My concern is that when something goes off the rails, it is going to be because of a variety of scenarios that will not have a lot to do with their good work. For example, it could be because there is a CIA Director who sees every lawyer's approval as a green light and every lawyer's warning as an annoyance. It could be because CIA leadership decides to hide from public scrutiny information that need not be classified.

My concerns about Ms. Haspel are not a matter of history. I have concerns about what she is saying today, both about her background and about current programs. I am concerned that after we have heard from John McCain and each of us has reflected, as I have briefly, on our extraordinary experiences with this unique public servant, we will still have to make a judgment here. I hope that colleagues, when they vote in a little bit, will recognize that there is much more that the full Senate and the American people have a right to know. I believe that if they did, they would join Senator McCain and me in opposing this nomination.

I regret to have to say, as I did in the beginning, that I believe the Senate has surrendered its responsibility to do real oversight here. This process has been a disservice to our constitutional duty. I believe the American people deserve to know more than that Gina Haspel likes Johnny Cash while she is simultaneously exercising the power to censor the facts about her background. I urge colleagues to reject this nomination.

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