Gina Haspel Says C.I.A. ‘Historically’ Has Not Interrogated Subjects. History Shows Otherwise.

Gina Haspel says the C.I.A. ‘historically’ has not interrogated subjects. 
Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency made the claim during her Senate confirmation hearing on Wednesday.

Ms. Haspel is right that before the enhanced interrogation program was created in response to the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, C.I.A. interrogations usually entailed a conversation or polygraph exam with potential informants or defectors. The C.I.A. has no detention authority and, as a matter of mission, generally does not interrogate detainees.

But the agency has occasionally been involved in interrogations in its past.

A Senate Intelligence Committee report on C.I.A.’s use of torture that was released in 2014, and the agency’s own website, provides several examples. 

The relevant portion of the 2014 report reads: “The C.I.A. did, however, have historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation. In 1963, the C.I.A produced the KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation Manual, intended as a manual for Cold War interrogations, which included the ‘principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression.’ ”

Methods described in KUBARK, like forced standing and sensory deprivation, were used by the C.I.A to interrogate a Soviet K.G.B. officer to determine whether he was a legitimate defector.