Saunders: CIA nominee’s No. 1 priority would be protecting U.S.

And it’s because Haspel put national security first.

Under President George W. Bush, Haspel authorized the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, which was used on three al-Qaida detainees. She was acting in accordance with Department of Justice memos that found harsh interrogation methods to be legal.

In 2018, the memos are a distant memory and critics breezily can dismiss CIA staffers who were desperate to prevent another 9/11 as torturers.

Did the same activists who found the harsh methods inhumane protest when President Barack Obama stepped up the use of drones? Some did. Others remained more indignant about methods authorized under a Republican president that were painful for detainees than methods authorized by his Democratic successor that killed terror suspects.

Haspel’s other big sin is her role in the destruction of videotapes that showed the waterboarding of two detainees. In 2005, she drafted a memo that advocated destroying the tapes. Her boss, then director of clandestine services, Jose Rodriguez, issued the memo and the tapes were destroyed. Investigators under Bush and Obama found no laws had been broken.

To the American Civil Liberties Union, this destruction of tapes that likely would have become a handy propaganda tool for al-Qaida is a bad thing, a denial of “transparency on torture.”

Scoring political points

The Haspel resistance is all about scoring points — and it ignores the input of a long list of national-security luminaries from both parties who urged the Senate to confirm Haspel.

Jeremy Bash, who was CIA chief of staff under Obama, wrote for NBC: “Senators should welcome Haspel’s clear-eyed approach to Russia, her expertise in counter-terrorism, her record of nonpolitical service and the fact that she is no crony of the president or anyone at the White House.”

As for the self-styled transparency coalition, it is amazing how the quest for sharing information evaporates when that mirror is turned on it. The ACLU media advisory notice for Wednesday’s conference call included this note: “Only on-topic questions will be addressed in the media call.”

During the call, a reporter had an unauthorized question for speaker Daniel Jones, billed as the “former chief investigator and lead author of the torture report” released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2014.

Jones’ name has been linked to Fusion GPS, the opposition research firm that commissioned the so-called “dossier” on Trump’s alleged ties with Russia. On May 1, former Trump aide Michael Caputo accused Jones of hiring Fusion GPS to continue its opposition research against Trump after the election.

When a reporter asked Jones, now president of the Penn Quarter Group, about those allegations, the ACLU said the call would address only questions about Haspel. When this journalist reached out to the Penn Quarter Group, no answer appeared. Transparency is a tool they have no problem discarding.