ProPublica Issues Serious Correction to Report on Trump CIA Director Nominee
ProPublica’s 2017 report on the involvement of Gina Haspel, President Trump‘s pick for CIA director, in overseeing torture got a lot of attention this week. Senator Rand Paul tore into Haspel over reports of “gleeful” remarks she made.
Well, today ProPublica issued a major correction of its previous report, with the new headline “Correction: Trump’s Pick to Head CIA Did Not Oversee Waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah.”
Editor-in-chief Stephen Engelberg has a lengthy note on the page explaining they got it wrong and how it happened:
The story said that Haspel, a career CIA officer who President Trump has nominated to be the next director of central intelligence, oversaw the clandestine base where Zubaydah was subjected to waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods that are widely seen as torture. The story also said she mocked the prisoner’s suffering in a private conversation. Neither of these assertions is correct and we retract them. It is now clear that Haspel did not take charge of the base until after the interrogation of Zubaydah ended.
Engelberg walks through the reporting process on this and makes note of how this report was touted “as evidence that she was not fit to run the agency.”
He does add, “The February 2017 ProPublica story did accurately report that Haspel later rose to a senior position at CIA headquarters, where she pushed her bosses to destroy the tapes of Zubaydah’s waterboarding. Her direct boss, the head of the agency’s Counterterrorism Center, ultimately signed the order to feed the 92 tapes into a shredder. Her actions in that instance, and in the waterboarding of al-Nashiri, are likely to be the focus of questions at her confirmation hearings.”
But Engelberg concludes with an apology:
We at ProPublica hold government officials responsible for their missteps, and we must be equally accountable. This error was particularly unfortunate because it muddied an important national debate about Haspel and the CIA’s recent history. To her, and to our readers, we can only apologize, correct the record and make certain that we do better in the future.
UPDATE –– 3/16, 4:03 pm ET: A spokesperson for Senator Paul has provided this statement:
Senator Rand Paul was quoting a Pulitzer-Prize winning reporter. Regardless of the retraction of one anecdote, the fact remains that Gina Haspel was instrumental in running a place where people were tortured. According to multiple published, undisputed accounts, she oversaw a black site and she further destroyed evidence of torture. This should preclude her from ever running the CIA.
[image via screengrab]
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