Former senior CIA officer Jose Rodriguez should be in prison instead of writing op-eds in the Washington Post. As he freely admits in his first paragraph, he was our torturer-in-chief during the Bush-Cheney era. He ought to be explaining why he paid $10 million to Pakistan for Abu Zabaydah and then tortured him mercilessly, when Abu Zabaydah didn’t even get along with al-Qaeda and basically arranged travel plans for a rival extremist organization. Why did Rodriguez’s terror-hunting operation think Abu Zabaydah was bin-Laden’s right-hand man? Why did they think he was involved in the African Embassy bombings? Why did they think he was involved in the millennial LAX bomb plot?
Rodriguez was not only morally depraved and sadistic, he was also incredibly incompetent. Nowhere in his piece does he give us one shred of evidence that his torture ever helped us catch anyone or solve any puzzle. He simply insists that this happened. What else is he going to say?
I’m surprised that he even brings Zubaydah’s name up since his case is one that brings only humiliation and dishonor upon himself. And he presents his defense as if Zubaydah’s was the only one he tortured. That’s not even close to being the case (Red Cross pdf). And, of course, once the CIA began to torture people, the practice expanded into the military and resulted in multiple deaths.
Rodriguez asks us to consider the context within which he made the decision to torture people. I’ve considered the context. So have tens of millions of other people. We’ve concluded that Rodriguez is a monster.
Rodriguez tells us that his torture saved lives. An exhaustive report by the incredibly CIA-friendly (until quite recently) Senate Intelligence Committee concludes otherwise.
Rodriguez asks us to remember that the “program was approved at the highest levels of the government, judged legal by the Justice Department and regularly briefed to the leaders of our congressional oversight committees.” That last part is a lie. The briefings were misleading and self-serving. As to the first two parts, we know, and that’s why we think the Bush administration was a monstrous abomination.
