Apparently years before E.L. James published any of her weirdo softcore Twilight fanfic, Gina Haspel was getting her freak on in memos to CIA headquarters from the black site she was running in Thailand.
Sitting atop one of those pinnacles of pain in Thailand, where al-Nashiri was repeatedly thrown against a wall, waterboarded, forced naked into a coffin-like box and threatened with a gun and electric drill, was Gina Haspel, the ambitious base chief and future CIA director."Strode, catlike"? "Hulking, heavily muscled"? Are you effin' kidding me? I haven't seen prose that purple since that time I wasted ninety-nine cents on some self-pubbed garbage thriller on Kindle, and this is actual official dot-gov correspondence.
And boy, did she enjoy it, judging by her pulse-pounding cables back to headquarters from Thailand in 2002. In prose seemingly inspired by bodice-ripping romance novels, the onetime U.S. Army base librarian described how the psychologist James Mitchell (whose hiring by the CIA remains a bizarre subchapter of the torture years), “strode, catlike, into the well-lit confines of the cell at 0902 hrs…deftly removed the subject's black hood with a swipe, paused, and in a deep, measured voice said that subject—having 'calmed down' after his (staged) run-in with his hulking, heavily muscled guards the previous day—should reveal what subject had done to vex his guards to the point of rage."
I understand you have to inform headquarters about how your torture program is going, but is it too much to ask for you to keep both hands on the keyboard while doing it, Ilsa?
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