This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, May 16, 2018.

I'm Keelock Brown.

The Gina Haspel nomination to head the CIA and her recent hearing before the Senate

leaves many questions unanswered, including the effective roles of both the White House

Office of Legal Counsel and lawyers for the CIA in approving torture programs.

Patrick Edington, a policy analyst in Homeland Security and Civil Liberties at the Cato

Institute, details what the debate over Haspels nomination leaves out.

There is still, it seems, some confusion about Gina Haspel's role within the now shuttered extraordinary

rendition programs that the US federal government undertook for a time shortly after 9-11.

What do we know about that now?

What we know, I think, with a high degree of confidence at this point is that for a roughly six-week

period in late 2002, Ms Haspel was tasked with a clean up and shutdown operation at the so-called black site

where Mr. Nasuri, of course in Ab Abu Zubeda, had been held to two alleged Al-Qaeda

operatives and in that capacity she was responsible I think for In that

site, she was responsible, I think, for trying to make sure that that site actually was closed down and anybody's still there

shipped off to one of the other black sites in another country.

This black site green has generally been referred to as being in Thailand.

I don't have direct knowledge of that, and it's not been publicly disclosed at this point by my former employer

the Central Intelligence Agency but I think all the reporting basically says this.

So she was there when Mr Neshiri was waterboarded at least three times and perhaps some other things have happened.

The biggest problem we have, of course, in all of this is that we don't have the full torture

report out in the public domain, the actual 6,500 page document.

...