Rodriguez & His Bushco Masters Torture America To Save Their Necks

[kpete]

Jose Rodriguez, Poster Boy
By Scott Horton

Why did Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, destroy ninety-two tapes of interrogation sessions in which terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding and other torture techniques? On Sunday, Lesley Stahl put the question to him on 60 Minutes, and he provided an answer:

rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those 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.

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Jose Rodriguez watched all of this happen. He would certainly appreciate the power of these historical precedents and the likelihood that the ninety-two tapes, if released, would come back to haunt him, and quite possibly send him to jail. That, I believe, is why he destroyed them.


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Indeed, why has Rodriguez not been charged and put on trial? That’s a question many are asking as he takes to the airwaves to push the idea that torture works. The only satisfactory answer lies in the doctrine of in pari delicto11. In pari delicto applies when both sides of a lawsuit have been involved in the same wrongdoing.—the Justice Department is itself so deeply enmeshed in Rodriguez’s crimes that it could hardly prosecute the case. But if this doctrine explains the DOJ’s failure to prosecute, it also suggests that someone else should be bringing the charges.


http://www.harpers.org/archive/2012/05/hbc-90008592