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Editor’s note: The author is a former CIA agent who was the first to confirm the agency’s secret waterboarding program and publicly describe it as “torture.” The government responded by charging him with leaking classified information to a reporter after which he was convicted and spent 30 months in a high-security federal prison from 2013 to 2015.

That brings us back to Gina Haspel. I have no doubt that she considers herself to be a patriot, as her supporters do. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is respect for the rule of law. Since the end of World War II, we have had laws in this country that specifically ban exactly those torture techniques implemented and overseen by Gina Haspel at a secret prison overseas. And the United States is a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture. Indeed, we were the primary drafters of that measure, which, having been ratified by the Senate, has the force of law in the United States. If Gina Haspel had any doubts about her “orders” from the CIA hierarchy, she had only to look at recent history. Just after the end of World War II, the United States executed Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American prisoners of war. Similarly, in January 1968, the Washington Post published a front-page photo of an American soldier waterboarding a North Vietnamese prisoner. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara ordered an investigation. The soldier was arrested, charged with torture, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years at Leavenworth. Torture was illegal in 1946. It was illegal in 1968. And it was illegal in 2002, no matter what Bush Justice Department officials John Yoo and Jay Bybee said. The law was clear.

Current CIA director Gina Haspel described graphic acts of deliberate physical torture including the waterboarding of a suspected Al-Qa’ida terrorist under her supervision when she was chief of base at a CIA black site in Thailand in 2002, according to declassified CIA cables – most of which she wrote or authorized – obtained by the National Security Archive through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit and posted on the Web today. The Haspel cables detail conditions the public has only seen in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs from Iraq of detainees hooded and shackled, forced nudity, wall slamming, and box confinement, as well as “enhanced techniques” never photographed such as the simulated drowning of suspects on the waterboard. Waterboarding is a war crime under both U.S. and international law, dating back to U.S. prosecution of Japanese solders for torturing U.S. POWs during World War II.[1]

ECCHR’s legal intervention filed with the German Federal Public Prosecutor (Generalbundesanwalt – GBA) is aimed at securing an arrest warrant for CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel. Haspel was appointed to the post by President Donald Trump in February 2017. The information submitted to the GBA by ECCHR on 6 June 2017 documents Haspel’s role in the torture of detainees in 2002 at a secret CIA prison in Thailand. In the dossier, ECCHR argues that Haspel oversaw the daily torture of detainees at the black site in 2002 and failed to do anything to stop it.  “Those who commit, order or allow torture should be brought before a court – this is especially true for senior officials from powerful nations,” said ECCHR’s General Secretary Wolfgang Kaleck. “The prosecutor must, under the principle of universal jurisdiction, open investigations, secure evidence and seek an arrest warrant. If the deputy director travels to Germany or Europe, she must be arrested.”

when it comes to our place on the world stage, we are at a crossroads. We can continue to build on our recent successes by reaffirming America’s role as a trusted, powerful nation guided by principle. Or we can throw it all away by allowing neocon interventionists to infiltrate our leadership and make America the purveyor of destruction. For decades, we have failed to bring about real peace thanks to a foreign policy guided by the idea that war and intervention are the answers. “Blow up and rebuild” has been the battle cry of those determined to keep us perpetually in conflict.

People already distrust the CIA. So why on earth has this administration picked someone to run the Agency who was instrumental in running a place where people were tortured and then covered it up afterwards?

Unfortunately, Haspel is just one of many potential neoconservatives being considered to serve in our country’s top leadership roles. The current CIA director and the president’s pick to become the next secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, has defended torture in the past. Further, he’s been a stalwart defender of the National Security Agency’s (NSA) unconstitutional spying programs and has even written in support of expanding the information government can collect. I could not support appointing him as CIA director in 2017, and for those same reasons, I will oppose his nomination to be our chief diplomat now. Just as troublesome are recent news reports that John Bolton is being considered for a senior administration position. Just recently, Bolton advocated for a preemptive strike against North Korea. If he had his way, our nation would be embroiled in dozens of armed conflicts in every corner of the world. I want to be clear. This issue is much bigger than a simple disagreement over policy—and far more consequential. These are dangerous appointments.

The new CIA director Gina Haspel is well known for actively directing and participating in the torture of prisoners at 'black sites': Beyond all that, she played a vital role in the destruction of interrogation videotapes that showed the torture of detainees both at the black site she ran and other secret agency locations. The concealment of those interrogation tapes, which violated multiple court orders as well as the demands of the 9/11 commission and the advice of White House lawyers, was condemned as “obstruction” by commission chairs Lee Hamilton and Thomas Keane. Haspel would be in jail if former president Barack Obama had not decided against prosecuting the CIA torture crimes. Torturing prisoners is a war crime. Obstruction of courts and destruction of evidence are likewise crimes.