Dexter Filkins at the New Yorker:

From 2003 to 2005, Gina Haspel was a senior official overseeing a top-secret C.I.A. program that subjected dozens of suspected terrorists to savage interrogations, which included depriving them of sleep, squeezing them into coffins, and forcing water down their throats. In 2002, Haspel was among the C.I.A. officers present at the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, an Al Qaeda suspect who was tortured so brutally that at one point he appeared to be dead.

On Thursday, the Trump Administration announced that Haspel would become the C.I.A.'s new deputy director.

..."You are putting a person in a leadership position who was centrally involved in an illegal program," Sifton told me. President Barack Obama ordered the closure of the secret prisons, or black sites, in 2009.

A former government official, who spoke to me on condition of anonymity, said that the promotion of Haspel amounted to the C.I.A.'s revenge. "The agency is giving the finger to anyone who was ever critical of the program," the former official said.

...When Obama took office, in 2009, he declared that he would not prosecute anyone involved in the C.I.A.'s interrogation programs, not even senior officers, among whom Haspel was one. At the time, Obama said he wanted to look forward and not back. But the past, as Obama well knows, never goes away. With the prospect of American torture looming again, I wonder if Obama regrets his decision. After all, people like Haspel, quite plausibly, could have gone to prison.

Update: It's come out that Gina Haspel wasn't involved in one particular instance of torture but was instead involved in a different instance of torture and also helped destroy evidence so we don't really know who was involved in what instances of torture. And somehow that's supposed to make it all ok.