Torture Tour

We begin with Jose Rodriguez on 60 Minutes. Rodriguez once headed the CIA counter-terrorism office and was also its director of operations. Not to put too fine a point on it, but, based on his interview with Lesley Stahl, I'm pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac. (That he is obviously a war criminal is the least of my problems with him.) I once sat in a courtroom for a week and watched people debate whether Jeffrey Dahmer, who killed and ate people, was crazy enough to spend his life in a hospital rather than in a jail, and Dahmer was not half so frightening in his aspect as Rodriguez was on Sunday night. There were moments in that interview where Stahl seemed genuinely concerned that Rodriguez was going to leap from his chair and bite her on the neck.

The sociopath is touring a book, Hard Measures, wherein he explains that we all likely would be dead if a bunch of pet lawyers in the Bush Administration hadn't greenlighted his efforts to drag the country down to into the cellars of the Lubyanka. He will make a nice piece of change on this book, which, thanks in part to the efforts of this administration, he never will have to spend on lawyers.

[...]

And, as a big finish, Rodriguez confessed yet again to the crime of destroying evidence, in the form of 92 videotapes of interrogation sessions that Rodriguez ordered deep-sixed.

[...]

STAHL: 92 tapes - Why did you order that they be destroyed?

RODRIGUEZ: To protect the people who work for me and who were at these black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.

STAHL: Protect them from what?

RODRIGUEZ: Protect them from al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.

Oh, bullshit. Those tapes were never going to be made public, and I don't think al Qaeda's vast intelligence apparatus has penetrated the CIA's directorate of operations. (If it has, then maybe torture doesn't work real well.) Those tapes got buried because the CIA didn't want even the vaguest notion of what it had been doing to leak out to the people who were paying the bills for it. But we look forward, and not back, and we don't put our torturers on trial. We put them on book tours. What a great country we are.

[...]

(Here, by the way, is an account of an actual terrorist plot that was broken up by — horrors! — conventional American law-enforcement. The alleged perpetrators are being — horrors again! — tried and likely convicted in a conventional American courtroom. The investigators and prosecutors in this case used lessons they'd learned from prosecuting mob families. "As you apply a law enforcement model to these cases, people always cooperate," said Anthony S. Barkow, a former federal prosecutor who specialized in terrorism cases and now works in private practice. "It took a long time in organized crime; it is taking less time with national security." No book contracts for you, Mr. Barkow. )

  Charlie Pierce