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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsPsychopath who covered up CIA torture now has a book to hawk
WASHINGTON (AP) The retired top CIA officer who ordered the destruction of videos showing waterboarding says in a new book that he was tired of waiting for Washington's bureaucracy to make a decision that protected American lives.
Jose Rodriguez, who oversaw the CIA's once-secret interrogation and detention program, also lashes out at President Barack Obama's administration for calling waterboarding torture and criticizing its use.
"I cannot tell you how disgusted my former colleagues and I felt to hear ourselves labeled 'torturers' by the president of the United States," Rodriguez writes in his book, "Hard Measures."
The book is due out April 30. The Associated Press purchased a copy Tuesday.
The chapter about the interrogation videos adds few new details to a narrative that has been explored for years by journalists, investigators and civil rights groups. But the book represents Rodriguez's first public comment on the matter since the tape destruction was revealed in 2007.
That revelation touched off a political debate and ignited a Justice Department investigation that ultimately produced no charges. Critics accused Rodriguez of covering up torture and preventing the public from ever seeing the brutality of the CIA's interrogations. Supporters hailed him as a hero who acted in the best interest of the country in the face of years of bureaucratic hand-wringing.
http://news.yahoo.com/ex-spy-destroying-cia-tapes-purged-ugly-visuals-212042971.html
hobbit709
(41,694 posts)Physical Persuasion Specialist. If you reframe the title it becomes more palatable.
Just in case.
leveymg
(36,418 posts)Bush, Cheney and Tenet all saw at least some of the torture sessions, and had ordered it. Obama's Justice Department now prosecutes the whistleblowers, while letting the torturers go free, a signal to others that they can to do it again (if so ordered) without consequence.
Interesting that CIA officer John Kiriakou got indicted, but Rodriguez walked. That is for the following reasons:
* JK refused to be trained in torture
* JK was the first CIA officer to publicly describe waterboarding as "torture" (2007/ABC News)
* JK exposed CIA's torture program as policy rather than some sort of unauthorized rogue action (2009/The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA's War on Terror)
ladjf
(17,320 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)EFerrari
(163,986 posts)Bake
(21,977 posts)The truth hurts, doesn't it.
Bake