Why You Never Saw The CIA's Interrogation Tapes

PBS.org
May. 20, 2015

When graphic photographs of American soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in 2004, they sparked international outrage — and prompted new scrutiny of how the U.S. treats its prisoners.

Even though Abu Ghraib itself wasn’t a CIA-run facility, the agency was worried about the scandal’s ramifications.

That’s because the CIA was in possession of something that was potentially more explosive than the detainee abuse photos: hundreds of hours of videotaped “enhanced interrogations” of two Al Qaeda suspects in CIA detention, that included the use of techniques widely described as torture.

As FRONTLINE details in tonight’s new documentary, Secrets, Politics and Torture, those tapes would never see the light of day. Their destruction was ordered by Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s top operations officer.

“I was told, if those videotapes had ever been seen, the reaction around the world would not have been survivable,” Jane Mayer of The New Yorker tells FRONTLINE.

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