London Review of Books<\/em> explained, there was practically no truth to the Obama administration\u2019s account of the killing of bin Laden.<\/p>\nThe\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d\u00a0episode traces the events leading up to the publishing of the Senate Intelligence Committee\u2019s torture report on December 9, 2014, and in so doing paints a picture of a government that rules on the basis of layer upon layer of criminal conspiracies. The new vernacular created by the intelligence apparatus and employed in the episode\u2019s narration gives the viewer a chilling sense of the measures used in the torture program: \u201cextraordinary rendition,\u201d \u201cblack site,\u201d \u201cenhanced interrogation tactics,\u201d \u201crectal rehydration,\u201d \u201crough takedown,\u201d \u201cconfinement box,\u201d \u201cwalling,\u201d \u201cauditory overload,\u201d \u201cwaterboarding,\u201d etc.<\/p>\n
The methods themselves are detailed at length in the episode, including the confinement of the prisoner Abu Zubaydah in a box less than two feet wide and less than three feet deep for dozens of hours at a time. Another prisoner was chained to a wall and forced to stand for 17 days, while another\u2013Gul Rahman\u2013died, likely of hypothermia, after being shackled to a cold floor for hours.<\/p>\n
Spliced throughout the episode are segments of interviews conducted by\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d\u00a0with two of the architects of the torture program, former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin and former CIA Deputy Legal Counsel John Rizzo. McLaughlin also served as Acting CIA Director in 2004, while Rizzo served as CIA Acting General Counsel from 2001\u20142002 and from 2004\u20142009.<\/p>\n
The statements made by McLaughlin and Rizzo are expressions of deeply anti-democratic views at the highest levels of the US government. In justifying the brutality of the programs, McLaughlin said, \u201cWe were at war. Bad things happen in wars.\u201d<\/p>\n
When asked about the morality of torture, his response was:<\/p>\n
\u201cWouldn\u2019t it be equally immoral if we failed to get this information and thousands of Americans died, [if] there was another 9\/11? How immoral would that be? That\u2019s the dilemma we were up against.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later, McLaughlin adds, \u201cDealing with hard core murderers is not patty cake.\u201d<\/p>\n
For his part, Rizzo explained that he found efforts to ban torture to be \u201cdeeply concerning,\u201d noting that it was \u201calarming\u201d that Senator John McCain thought the CIA\u2019s methods fit the definition of torture.<\/p>\n
Rizzo was alarmed by these developments in part because he was aware he could be thrown in prison as a war criminal for approving the torture programs. He admits in the course of the\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d\u00a0interview that his efforts to \u201cinsulate\u201d the CIA from criminal liability were \u201ccrumbling\u201d when the Supreme Court noted in its 2006 Hamdan v. Rumsfeld<\/em> decision that the Geneva Convention applied to detainees of the wars in the Middle East and Central Asia.<\/p>\nThe\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d\u00a0episode details how the CIA, under both the Bush and Obama administrations, has exerted an immense amount of influence to provide legal immunity for the torturers. The episode notes that leading Bush administration officials pressured interrogators to continue torturing prisoners even after some interrogators noted that it was \u201chighly unlikely\u201d that those tortured would provide information, and that the FBI removed one of their agents from a black site when he called the FBI and asked for permission to arrest the torturers.<\/p>\n
Video evidence of the interrogations taking place was destroyed by former CIA National Clandestine Service Director Jose Rodriguez in 2005. The CIA also feared that the tapes would spark a broad outcry of opposition to US imperialism. As New Yorker<\/em> reporter Jane Mayer told\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d, \u201cI was told if those videos had ever been seen, the reaction around the world would not have been survivable.\u201d<\/p>\nThe Obama administration refused to punish Rodriguez for his clearly illegal actions. Rodriguez\u2019s attorney, Robert Bennett, told the Washington Post<\/em> in 2009 that he was \u201cpleased\u201d that the Obama administration would not press criminal charges against his client. \u201cJose Rodriguez is an American hero,\u201d he said.<\/p>\nThe Obama administration has not only kept every one of the program\u2019s architects safe from prosecution, it employs dozens of those involved, including CIA Director John Brennan.<\/p>\n
As journalist Peter Baker of the New York Times<\/em> explains during the concluding minutes of the episode, \u201cThere\u2019s no more investigation that\u2019s going to happen, there\u2019s no more legal consequences that we know of and there\u2019s no policy debate.\u201d<\/p>\nThough the\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201depisode takes a detached tone in recounting the litany of crimes conducted at the highest levels of the American state over the past decade and a half, the fact remains that state torture is a war crime, and those responsible for the program and the subsequent cover-up\u2013both Republican and Democrat\u2013should be put in prison where they belong.<\/p>\n
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News<\/a> with permission or license.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By\u00a0Eric London (WSWS) – \u00a0On Tuesday, May 19, PBS aired an episode of its weekly television program\u00a0\u201cFrontline\u201d\u00a0documenting the Central Intelligence Agency\u2019s torture of hundreds of detainees under the Bush Administration. The episode, titled \u201cSecrets, Politics, and Torture,\u201d reviews the CIA\u2019s unconstitutional and illegal efforts to set up, implement, maintain, and justify an international campaign […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-153306","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153306","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=153306"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/153306\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=153306"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=153306"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=153306"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}