The shame of 60 Minutes, how CBS hopes to profit from torture, and the people who love them

I winced throughout last night's horrifying edition of 60 Minutes, the geriatric television news magazine, in which correspondent Lesley Stahl granted a fawning interview to unconvicted war criminal Jose Rodriguez, one of the chief perpetrators of the Bush Adminstration's torture program after 9/11.

Rodriguez's lack of repentance for his crimes is not exactly news, of course - nor is the general pro-torture tilt of 60 Minutes.  So I wasn't surprised by the revolting tone of Stahl's questions - she joshed with the defiant old sadist, wondering aloud things like, "But golly, didn't the Nazis do things like this?' while generally treating the torture debate as if it were a kind of genial after-dinner conversation.

Of course Stahl was forced by the facts to leave obvious lacunae in her questioning - otherwise all "civility" would have collapsed, for Rodriguez's positions are hilariously self-contradictory: he destroyed whatever evidence might have exonerated him from charges of torture, for instance - because, of course, said evidence would have condemned, not exonerated, him.  Stahl daintily pirouetted around that.  His other jibes at the sober assessments by outside authorities of his bloody career ("Bullshit!" he exclaims at one point) were largely let stand; it was all a disgusting mockery of "investigative journalism."

Still, the only real news came at the end of the program - Rodriguez's book (for which the 60 Minutes appearance was really a kind of promotional appearance) is being published by - wait for it - Simon & Schuster - a division of CBS.  So all along, Lesley Stahl was essentially interviewing an employee of her own company - or rather, she was doing a puff piece on someone from whom her company hopes to reap a substantial profit (and to whom it has already no doubt paid a hefty advance).

Really, it's all just too sickening - and it's proof positive that the cancer Roger Ailes seeded at Fox News has already metastasized throughout the "legitimate" press.  Somehow this seems even lower than the New York Times's notorious cheerleading of the Iraq War (and yes, I once actually got paychecks from those people, I'm sorry to say). How anyone could at this point be proud of working for CBS News is simply beyond me.

When is a terrorist not a terrorist?

In one of the most embarrassingly unconscious self-accusations in recent memory, Newsweek weighs in on why Joe Stack, the guy who flew his plane into an IRS building, was "not a terrorist" here. The brilliant Glen Greenwald tears Newsweek a new one here. Over at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum teases out a possible argument that Stack doesn't qualify as a terrorist: his gripes against "the system" were too crackpot to qualify as political justification for what was, obviously, a terrorist act. Your mileage may vary on that one, but for me it's Drum's argument that doesn't quite qualify as a political justification for not calling Stack a terrorist.

Meanwhile Mark P. Shea wonders aloud, "Why aren't we waterboarding Joe Stack's daughter right now?" After all, she called her dad "a hero," and she certainly could be connected to the crazy-tea-baggin' underbelly of American culture. What does she know, and when did she know it? Charles Krauthammer, what's your opinion?

[Update: It turns out Stack's daughter moved to Norway some years ago. Make that high-tax, but almost all-white, Norway.]

Taken together, all this "debate" does begin to get at a central question about those who support torture in this country, which is: are they racist, consciously or unconsciously? What does it mean when we're so reluctant to call a crazed white man who flies his plane into a building a terrorist? Why is waterboarding his white daughter so completely out of the question for these people? In other words, is support for torture really a form of racism? Newsweek editors, discuss among yourselves!

You knew this was coming . . .

Anyone who imagined that the controversy over the CIA's torture policy was actually about "waterboarding" is either very innocent or very young. I long suspected that there was actually more horrifying instances of torture lurking behind the stonewalling around waterboarding, and now some of that information has begun to leak out. For instance, on Friday the British High Court rejected US and British efforts to suppress details of the CIA torture (in Pakistan) of British citizen Binyam Mohamed. For years the Bush, and now Obama, administrations have been trying to suppress the facts about what happened to Mohamed (who also spent time in Guantanamo).

Here's why, from Glenn Greenwald:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed's genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, "is very far down the list of things they did," the official said.

And no, the laundry list of who's involved in this is not pretty. It seems Hillary Clinton herself at one point intervened to suppress the details of Bush-era torture. And the Obama administration is currently attempting to block Mohamed's bid to seek restitution in the US court system as well. Yes, we can, indeed.

And I have to ask any conservatives out there, or other apologists for the Bush-Cheney torture regime: if this sort of thing happened to American soldiers, what exactly do you think a certain portion of the American public would be crying out for?

Death and destruction rained down on the nations of the perpetrators?

Exactly.

The torture memos in song

For more information on the effort to impeach federal judge Jay Bybee, author of the infamous torture memo which provided many of the lyrics above, go here.

No Torture. No Exceptions.

Off-topic, but this can never be said often enough.

Our war crimes

All in a day's "enhanced interrogation" at Abu Ghraib.

Halloween's over, but the scary stuff is just beginning. The New York Times today has an intriguing analysis of the Attorney General nominee's tortured statements on torture: he's clearly angling to somehow absolve the Bush administration of its war crimes. But even if we Americans remain "Good Germans," as Frank Rich so aptly put it, the rest of the world probably won't follow suit. Already Donald Rumsfeld has been charged with torture in France. Similar actions against Rumsfeld, Alberto Gonzalez and George Tenet are underway in Germany (of all places - that Jehovah dude, what an ironist!). The possibility exists that eventually, even President Bush will be charged.

Can David Hare's sequel to Stuff Happens - perhaps titled Shit Hits the Fan - be too far behind? And are we ready to play the villain's role in our own Judgment at Nuremberg?

Leni Riefenstahl, meet the Fox Network!

Finally, it seems, the ongoing horrorshow that is the Fox network's 24 is getting some in-depth media attention. Not for nothing is this the favorite show of the Cheney administration; in its overheated milieu of testosterone-drenched anxiety, torture is always on the menu, and it always works (and that nuclear time bomb is always somewhere, and always ticking). You could argue that this show alone is largely responsible for the support torture has among the American public - and thus also is at least partly responsible for both our losing the high ground in the "war on terror," and our sinking moral profile in the eyes of the world (as well as, of course, the torment and even murder of numerous innocent people). The situation is so clear, and so serious, that the Dean of the United States Military Academy at West Point recently flew to the show's production facility to complain about the show's effect on military personnel -who, it's been reported, sometimes model their interrogation behavior on that of psychopathic "patriot" Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland, above, with Leni); its executive producer, Joel Surnow (coincidentally a big Rick Santorum supporter) ducked the meeting, however, pleading that his attention deficit disorder prevented him from sitting still that long (no, I'm not making that up). Surnow is currently developing a "conservative answer" to the Jon Stewart show. Meanwhile, the torture continues - because we think we're living in a paranoid TV show.