In an interview with Yahoo News, Fiorina, who has seen a surge in polls based on her inaccurate statements about women’s health organization Planned Parenthood, has now endorsed the use of waterboarding — an interrogation technique determined to be torturous even by the 2014 Senate report.
“I believe that all of the evidence is very clear — that waterboarding was used in a very small handful of cases [and] was supervised by medical personnel in every one of those cases,” Fiorina told Yahoo News. “And I also believe that waterboarding was used when there was no other way to get information that was necessary.”
Described as “near drownings” in the Senate’s report, waterboarding is the act of pouring water over a cloth on a prisoner's face to simulate the sensation of drowning. The Senate report concluded that the torture produced little useful intelligence.
But Fiorina isn’t going to let a little thing like “facts” get in the way of her pandering to the extreme right with feigned outrage and aggression.
“It’s outrageous for anybody to claim that torture was limited or that this is the way the US should have conducted business after 9/11,” Naureen Shah, director of the security and human rights program at Amnesty International USA, told the Guardian in response to Fiorina’s statements.
“This is completely rewriting the history of what happened.”
Fiorina has had a tight relationship with the security community, going all the way back to her time as the CEO of Hewlett-Packard.
Following the attacks on September 11, 2001, Fiorina received a call from NSA director Michael Hayden asking for her to provide the agency with servers to expand surveillance.
Fiorina complied without blinking an eye.
“I felt it was my duty to help, and so we did,” Fiorina said. “They were ramping up a whole set of programs and needed a lot of data crunching capability to try and monitor a whole set of threats. …What I knew at the time was our nation had been attacked.”
