Is The Movie "Zero Dark Thirty" CIA Propaganda? ---PBS "FRONTLINE" Examines

[KoKo]

How George W. Bush and Dick Cheney brought torture to America

Tonight, Frontline will air a documentary called Secrets, Politics, and Torture, directed by Michael Kirk, about how President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney institutionalized torture in American politics and government.

Is The Movie "Zero Dark Thirty" CIA Propaganda? | FRONTLINE

Three major developments explored in detail by Kirk drive home the extent to which Bush and Cheney worked to ingrain torture in the American state.

The first was the crushing ideological pressure to torture that came from the top of the Bush administration. The most striking example of this came directly after 9/11, when al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah was captured. Since the CIA had zero personnel with experience in interrogation, the FBI was initially brought in. Ali Soufan, a highly experienced interrogator and Muslim who speaks fluent Arabic, took charge of the questioning. He deployed the traditional police model, which focuses on building rapport and a criminal case. Almost immediately, Zubaydah gave up Khalid Sheik Mohammad as a member of al Qaeda.

Despite that quick success, word came down from Washington: Use violence. A man named James Mitchell convinced the Bush brass that he had a better way. The CIA eventually paid his company — co-founded with another psychologist, Bruce Jessen — $81 million. The two had been psychologists in the Air Force, where they oversaw the mock interrogators in the SERE program, which trained Navy SEALs what to do in case they were captured or tortured by the enemy.

Mitchell did not speak Arabic. He had no experience whatsoever in Islamic extremism generally or al Qaeda in particular. And he had never even interrogated anyone. That is who replaced Soufan, who was without question one of the finest al Qaeda specialists in the entire country at the time. That is the level of competence the Bush administration was willing to flush down the toilet to validate its iron belief that non-violent interrogations (soft, weak, liberal) could never work, despite Soufan's proven success. They would have put an ice cream truck driver in charge of interrogations, so long as he had some crackpot scheme about freezing detainees half to death in soft serve.

It took a terrific fight with much of the professional bureaucracy — Soufan at one point considered arresting the CIA agents torturing Zubaydah — but torture eventually prevailed.

The second development occurred when the torture bill came due. The Abu Ghraib torture scandal was a colossal stain on Bush's legacy, and by late 2005 much of the administration had turned against the CIA program. Then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice led a push inside the administration to announce an official stop to the program. At a high-level meeting in the White House, everyone but Cheney agreed with Rice, and she seemed to have won. A speech was arranged.

But as happened so often in the Bush administration, Cheney went to Bush personally afterward, and convinced him that Rice was wrong. Rice went to the speech expecting Bush to disavow "enhanced interrogation," but instead he embraced it, and claimed it had produced valuable intelligence (it hadn't).

This is "one more example of the long shadow Cheney casts over the American government," Kirk said in an interview with The Week.

Continued at:

http://theweek.com/articles/555720/how-george-w-bush-dick-cheney-brought-torture-america

[project_bluebook]

1. CIA

Careless Incapable Assholes.

All you get when you torture is lies and you destroy a countries soul. All involved with enhanced interrogation should be sent to prison.

[Lodestar]

2. Of COURSE it is! The whole bin Laden escapade is a sham.

He was never proven to be behind 9-11 and was just another convenient boogeyman.
Not that he was sweet on the USA...but he's been used as the reason for our invasion of
Afghanistan.
The baddest of the bad were right here at home all along, still hiding in plain sight.

[swilton]

3. Public relations

to stimulate consumerism is only one aspect of how psychology is used to control the masses. The basic concept is the appeal to emotions rather than logic to manipulate individuals and/or masses. I do think the CIA employs psychologists and the public is manipulated in countless ways without even realizing it. I have heard it argued that Walt Disney was on the government payroll.

One film maker who has explored the science of public relations is Adam Curtis - his three part series 'The Power of Nightmares' is on YOUTUBE and also has appeared on DU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Curtis

[KoKo]

4. "Power of Nightmares" is Powerful Watch....

for those who haven't seen it. Recommend!