CAPITOL HILL: 17th May 2018:
Gina Haspel confirmed as CIA Director
Gina Haspel has been confirmed to lead the CIA despite her dark history with the agency.

The 54-45 vote in her favour follows a partisan fight among senators about the CIA’s Bush-era policy of rendition, detention and the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other methods of obtaining information, details of which remain classified.

CAPITOL HILL: 16th May 2018:
Trump's pick to lead CIA wins support of Senate Panel:
The full Senate is expected to vote later this month on Haspel’s nomination to become the CIA’s first female director. Still, her confirmation is all but assured after key Democrats said they would back Haspel.

CAPITOL HILL: 9th May 2018:
Haspel grilled by Senate Intelligence Committee:
The intelligence Senate Committee held a confirmation hearing on Wednesday morning for Gina Haspel, president Trump’s nominee to lead the CIA.

Her nomination is highly contraversial because of her role in the agency’s counterterrorism operations after the September, 2001 attacks, including running a so-called black site prison in Thailand where suspects were waterboarded and subjected to other forms of interrogation techniques.

TIME: 23rd April 2018:
100 Retired Generals and Admirals express “concern” over Haspel nomination:
“We are deeply troubled by the prospect of someone who appears to have been intimately involved in torture being elevated to one of the most important positions of leadership in the intelligence community,” the military officials write.    Read letter ......

LOS ANGELES TIMES: 19th April, 2018:
Gina Haspel Senate Confirmation Hearing: 9th May 2018:
Outside groups are upping the pressure on Senators to reject President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to direct the Central Intelligence Agency, Gina Haspel, ahead of her May 9 confirmation hearing.

WASHINGTON POST: 13th March, 2018:
Gina Haspel, C.I.A. Deputy Director, Had Leading Role in Torture
As a clandestine officer at the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002, Gina Haspel oversaw the torture of two terrorism suspects and later took part in an order to destroy videotapes documenting their brutal interrogations at a secret prison in Thailand.

On 2nd February, 2017, Donald Trump appointed Ms. Haspel as deputy director of the CIA, a post which does not require Senate confirmation.

She played a direct role in the C.I.A.'s “extraordinary rendition program”, under which captured militants were handed to foreign governments and held at secret facilities, where they were tortured by agency personnel.

The C.I.A.'s first overseas detention site was in Thailand. It was run by Ms. Haspel, who oversaw the brutal interrogations of two detainees, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

Mr. Zubaydah alone was waterboarded 83 times in a single month, had his head repeatedly slammed into walls and endured other harsh methods before interrogators decided he had no useful information to provide.

The sessions were videotaped and the recordings stored in a safe at the C.I.A. station in Thailand until 2005, when they were ordered destroyed. By then, Ms. Haspel was serving at C.I.A. headquarters, and it was her name that was on the cable carrying the destruction orders.

The agency maintains that the decision to destroy the recordings was made by Ms. Haspel's boss at the time, Jose Rodriguez, who was the head of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service.

But years later, when the C.I.A. wanted to name Ms. Haspel to run clandestine operations, Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, then the senior Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, blocked the promotion over Ms. Haspel's role in the interrogation program and the destruction of the tapes.