The morally revolting things the BBC news does more than cancels out the interesting pieces they run. [1]
They were at it again this morning. The occasion was the Senate “Intelligence Oversight” [sic] Committee finally getting up the backbone to release its own report on the CIA torture program. (Usually euphemized as “harsh interrogation program” allegedly to “protect us” from “terrorism.” There’s one way to get a scaredy-cat populace to endorse systematic government kidnapping and torture, in violation of treaty obligations and U.S. law.)
The BBC anchor said the report contained “details of harsh CIA interrogation” [hey BBC, can you pronounce “torture”?] during the “CIA’s campaign against Al-Qaeda.” At least, that was the excuse given. (Just keep in mind that it was secret police types who planted the explosives that blew up three (not two) buildings in lower Manhattan in 2001.
[2]) (I didn’t catch the anchor’s name, but he’s a regular, a male with an African accent. There’s only one who hosts their overnight radio broadcast to the U.S.)
After this muddled intro, he brings on just ONE person- a “former CIA counterterrorism analyst.” (Rather like bringing on the axe-murderer’s lawyer to discuss the matter!) This man spouted such rhetoric as the “CIA’s sort of harsh methods,” (sort of harsh!) and “certain techniques” (unspecified) of the “enhanced interrogation program.”
The BBC man helpfully exclaimed that the report was old news, there wasn’t anything new about the [torture, the word they won’t say] in it. (In fact that was a flat lie, as the report DOES contain new details of the types and methods of torture.) The BBC creep also dismissed the whole thing as just “political.” “So what is the point of releasing this report? Is it political?” (Odd attitude for an alleged journalist! Who needs official records? Just keep everything secret! Is he angling for a job as CIA spokesman?) The CIA man happily agreed that the report is “a political football for those who have already made up their minds.” He also rebuked “the fecklessness of the Democratic Party who have tried to make the CIA a scapegoat.” “All of this was approved” by the White House, the lawyers [like John Yoo!], the CIA’s lawyers, he says. Well then no problem torturing people! Hey, your lawyers said it’s okay. (By the way, the Nazis had lawyers say the same thing about Hitler’s crimes. It means nothing.)
By the way, the report is 525 pages, but the BBC anchor already knows there’s nothing in it. No news here folks, move along!
Grotesque.
The BBC is acting as if it‘s a
U.S. government propaganda agency. Oddly, even the U.S. government radio network NPR didn’t do that. The 12 noon (U.S. east coast time) NPR newscast called the report “scathing.”
Even secret police groupie and conduit for U.S. secret police propaganda Dina Temple-Raston, officially titled “NPR’s national security correspondent,” had to admit the report, even after CIA and Obama regime censorship, painted a pretty awful picture. Torture methods included days or weeks of sleep deprivation, and contrary to CIA lies, “Abu Ghraib-style” brutality, such as dragging their prisoners naked down hallways, Temple-Raston reports. But she made sure to end her brief news story with the CIA line that CIA says the report is all wrong. (The U.S. media has been parroting that CIA lie
ad nauseam every time the story of the long-suppressed report has come up.)
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| Dina likes to imagine she's a secret agent. Exciting! |
One thing the report asserts definitively is that NO plots were foiled by torture, Osama bin Laden WASN’T captured thanks to torture (a lie promoted by the movie
Zero Dark Thirty, made with the help of illegally released “classified” info by the CIA and Obama White House), and in fact useful information was
not obtained. The CIA of course contradicts all that- but they would, they’re the torturers. Oh, and they illegally broke into the computers of the Senate Committee staffers who were working on the report, a Federal felony (dozens in fact, the way the Federal government charges people) for which not only was no one prosecuted, but Eric “Due Process Means We Decide to Kill You” Holder, Jr., Obama’s Attorney General, refused to even investigate.
Obama and the CIA dug in their heels and resisted like mules the release of the report. Idiotically, the Senators
let the CIA censor the report. And after months of Obama doing all he could to squelch the Senate report, his chief mouthpiece, Josh Earnest, had the nerve to say Obama very much wanted the report to be released.
Later the BBC World “Service” puts on “former” CIA dog Bob Baer, an arch reactionary who is one of the CIA’s public faces. Baer insists the
only point of releasing the report is as a Democratic partisan attack on the Bush regime. Oh, and the details of torture “puts people’s lives at risk.” The old “sources and methods” mantra. Oh, and the Geneva Conventions are irrelevant because Al-Qaeda never signed them! (But the U.S.
has, jackass. And anti-torture conventions too.) As for torturing innocent people, “that’s no different than the British police,” who arrest and release people. And he used “3,000” killed on 9/11 as justification. (Ironic, that, given the fact that most of them were killed because of the demolitions planted in advance by agents of the U.S. secret police deep state.)
Do they have Nazis on to discuss the Holocaust?
Hey, maybe next time there’s a U.S. torture scandal, ask a human rights lawyer! (This particular report, by Rebecca Kesby, did include a short description by a torture victim of what he suffered.)
NPR has a decent, succinct overview of the history of the development of the Senate "Intelligence" Committee torture report, which refutes the CIA’s and BBC’s bullshit, "
Report Says CIA Misled Senate, White House On Interrogation Program," Dec. 9, 2014.
1] This is nothing new for the British government’s propaganda outfit. See for example “
The BBC: Cover Up Central,” “
Why Is The BBC Defending Chinese Computer Hacking?,” and “
BBC, NPR Ignore Egyptian Seizure of Aljazeera Journalists.” for some absolutely breath-taking examples of egregious BBC propaganda that grossly distorts reality and covers the butts of some awful state criminals. (Which states might surprise you. In one case they
hid Chinese computer hacking aimed at the U.S. Apparently their desire to suck up to the Chinese rulers so British capitalists could try to make a buck there outweighed even their slavish subservience to the U.S.A.!)
2] A thoroughly documented fact supported by over a thousand architects and engineers, plus demolitions experts. See for example “
9/11: Explosive Evidence -- Experts Speak Out (Full)” and “
9/11: Blueprint for Truth-The Architecture of Destruction-114min.”
