A former CIA employee was charged Thursday with resisting arrest and unlawfully disrupting Congress after protesting at Gina Haspel’s confirmation hearing to be CIA director.
Ray McGovern, who is 78 years old, was dragged out of the hearing Wednesday and pinned to the ground as he denounced Haspel’s role in post-9/11 waterboarding of terrorism suspects.
“I wish you wouldn’t beat up an old man,” McGovern told U.S. Capitol Police officers, who told him repeatedly to stop resisting.
“I’m not resisting. No I’m not. I’m laying on the ground,” McGovern said in a video clip viewed more than 550,000 times on Twitter and another 400,000 times on Facebook, as of Thursday afternoon. He said he believed one of his arms had been dislocated.
Former 27-year CIA officer Ray McGovern just protested at the Senate confirmation hearing for torturer Gina Haspel.
Police responded by violently brutalizing the 78-year-old whistleblower, throwing him to the ground and dislocating his arm.
(Credit: https://t.co/Z4TU2a38Xz) pic.twitter.com/dwJuozjSe8
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) May 9, 2018
McGovern was arraigned near the close of the business day Thursday after being arrested Wednesday afternoon.
“They held him the entire day,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, an attorney who represents McGovern in a separate matter. Six other activists arrested at Haspel’s hearing paid a $50 fine for “incommoding” and were quickly released.
McGovern pleaded not guilty to the two charges, online records indicate. Donald Dworsky, listed as McGovern’s attorney in the case, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
McGovern worked at the CIA for 27 years in various capacities, before retiring and turning to activism in the early 2000s. He did not immediately respond to an email requesting comment.
A spokesperson for the U.S. Capitol Police also did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bill Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney’s office, which prosecutes both federal and local crimes in the nation’s capital, said, “We don’t comment on charging decisions.”
The decision to charge McGovern gives him a platform to discuss Haspel’s conduct, and to highlight the fact that he’s arguably only the second person prosecuted in relation to post-9/11 interrogations that critics deem torture.
No U.S. official was prosecuted for participating in the CIA’s discontinued interrogation program, but former CIA employee John Kiriakou, a critic of waterboarding, spent nearly two years in prison for giving a journalist contact information for a story, which the journalist did not publish.
Kiriakou told the Washington Examiner he’s upset by McGovern’s treatment.
“He should be celebrated, not prosecuted,” Kiriakou said. “The Capitol Police’s reprehensible use of violence against this 78-year-old man is what we should be talking about today.”
Verheyden-Hilliard said it’s unclear what McGovern’s trial strategy will be, or if he will seek jury nullification by trying to redirect the focus to Haspel’s alleged conduct, which includes supervising a CIA “black site” in Thailand when one suspect was waterboarded.
“I can say that I really think it bears noting that there are only two people who have been jailed for the torture program,” Verheyden-Hilliard said. “Every single one of those people who engaged in torturing around the world in our name, not one of them has had to see the inside of a jail cell. Except for when they were torturing people.”
