Ms. Haspel, the career spy who once oversaw the waterboarding of a terrorism suspect, defended the agency’s past at her confirmation hearing, but said there would be no torture in its future.
WASHINGTON — Gina Haspel, President Trump’s nominee to the lead the Central Intelligence Agency, defended the agency’s torture of terrorism suspects as her confirmation hearing on Wednesday served as another reckoning of the extraordinary measures the government employed in the frantic hunt for the Sept. 11 conspirators.
Ms. Haspel, a 33-year C. I. A. veteran who oversaw a secret prison in Thailand in 2002 while a Qaeda suspect was waterboarded there, said that she and other spies were working within the law. Though the C. I. A. should never resume that type of work, she said, its officers should also not be judged for doing it.
“I’m not going to sit here with the benefit of hindsight, and judge the very good people who made hard decisions, who were running the agency in very extraordinary circumstances,” she told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
But poised to take over the agency, Ms. Haspel appeared eager to move past one of its darkest chapters.
She vowed that she would not start another interrogation program like the one developed under President George W. Bush. It involved brutal techniques like waterboarding, dousing detainees with buckets of ice water, stripping them naked, slamming them against the wall, forcing them to stay awake for as long as a week and subjecting some to medically unnecessary rectal feeding.
“Having served in that tumultuous time,” she said, “I can offer you my personal commitment, clearly and without reservation, that under my leadership, C. I. A. will not restart such a detention and interrogation program.”
Ms. Haspel, seeking to shape the public’s impression of her in her first high-profile appearance, introduced herself as an Army “brat” born in Kentucky and a “typical, middle-class American” — albeit one who spent her adult life on the rise in the exotic world of intelligence gathering, where danger and intrigue constantly lurked.
“From my first days in training, I had a knack for the nuts and bolts of my profession,” she said. “I excelled in finding and acquiring secret information that I obtained in brush passes, dead drops, or in meetings in dusty alleys of third-world capitals.”
But as senators began to press her on her views on torture, Ms. Haspel, 61, shrugged off the mantles of everyday citizen and spy-novel protagonist, revealing the disposition of a hardened secret agent.
She rejected Democrats’ suggestions that she declassify more information about her background, saying that the director should be subject to agency guidelines on keeping its secrets. She bristled and pushed back on suggestions that the interrogation program was immoral, insisting that her own “moral compass is strong,” and fought to describe what she said were its successes in capturing the United States’ most-wanted men.
The interrogation program “has cast a shadow over what has been a major contribution to protecting this country,” she said, citing the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the self-described mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, as an example of the C. I. A.’s “extraordinary work.”
Her comments reflected how, years after the methods used by C. I. A. on Qaeda suspects were outlawed, there remains a deep ambivalence about the program inside the agency. Few want to see a return to torture. But many veterans of the detention program remain in the C. I. A.’s ranks, and they are seen within the agency as having faithfully done their jobs using methods that the Bush administration had declared legal.
The program was effectively ended in 2007 and its techniques prohibited by President Barack Obama in 2009. In a sweeping report in 2014, the Intelligence Committee excoriated the agency for practices that it said were far less effective than the C. I. A. led either the Bush administration or the public to believe.
Ms. Haspel defended herself, saying she embraced the chance to serve after the terrorist attacks.
“After 9/11, I didn’t look to go sit on the Swiss desk — I stepped up,” she said. “I was not on the sidelines. I was on the front lines in the Cold War, and I was on the front lines in the fight against Al Qaeda.”
Democratic senators peppered her with confrontational questions from the outset. They repeatedly asked for details on Ms. Haspel’s role in some of the most notorious episodes of the interrogation program, including her conveyance of an order from her superior to destroy videotapes documenting 92 of the interrogations.
In her first public account of the destruction, which occurred in 2005, she said there were concerns about the “security risk” the tapes posed — that the lives of undercover agency officers might be put in danger if they were to become public.
Rumors have long swirled — but never been confirmed — that Ms. Haspel appeared in the tapes, some of which were made when she was running the C. I. A. detention facility in Thailand. Her answer was definitive: “I did not appear on the tapes,” she said.
Other pressing national security issues — Russia, China, the Iran nuclear deal or the role of the C. I. A. under a president who once compared intelligence officials to Nazis — got little airtime as Democrats hammered Ms. Haspel, and Republicans sought to portray her as uniquely qualified to run America’s premier spy agency.
“Some may seek to turn this hearing into a trial about a long-shuttered program,” said Senator Richard Burr of North Carolina, the Republican chairman of the committee. “This hearing is not about programs already addressed by executive order, legislation, and the court of law. It’s about the woman seated in front of us.”
