The above interview is part of the article CIA Psychologist’s Notes Reveal True Purpose Behind Bush’s Torture Program

Here is the email that I received to introduce this article:

It’s been nine years since the Bush administration implemented its highly-classified torture program, where government interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees held at CIA prisons and at Guantanamo to brutal techniques in an effort, the public was told, to thwart pending terrorist attacks against the United States and its interests abroad.

While President Obama and Congressional lawmakers “look forward” and have failed to hold accountable those individuals who violated international and domestic human rights laws, new revelations continue to surface showing the extent of the previous administration’s war crimes and the lies upon which they were based.

Indeed, as Jason Leopold and Jeffrey Kaye report in this in-depth investigative report, the handwritten notes, obtained exclusively by Truthout, that were drafted by Dr. John Bruce Jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the so-called “enhanced interrogation” program, show that torture was used to “exploit” detainees and to get them to “collaborate” with government authorities.

The documents stand as the first pieces of hard evidence to surface that further explain the psychological aspects of Bush’s torture program and the rationale for subjecting detainees to so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Jessen’s notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a decorated veteran who previously held high-ranking positions within the Department of Defense, and is speaking publicly for the first time. Kearns, who worked closely with Jessen in developing a survival training program for military personnel that the torture program was based upon, said Jessen’s “duplicitous act is appalling to me and shall haunt me for the rest of my life.”

Supplementing this groundbreaking report is an exclusive, on-camera interview with Captain Kearns conducted by Jason Leopold. Truthout is also providing our readers with copies of Jessen’s notes that can be downloaded from the article page.

I do not hold up CNN as a paragon of journalistic virtue, so make of this what you will.
Below is the video and a few paragraphs from the report CNN Correspondent Goes Ballistic Over Fox News Libya/Human Shield Report.

CNN correspondent Nic Robertson has a bone or two to pick with Fox News, which reported today that he and other journalists were used by the Libyan Ministry of Information as human shields, in a successful bid to block a coming, second attack on a compound in Tripoli, supposedly controlled by Qaddafi.

“[T]his allegation is outrageous and it’s absolutely hypocritical. When you come to somewhere like Libya, you expect lies and deceit from a dictatorship here,” Robertson told Wolf Blitzer. “You don’t expect it from the other journalists.”

In his article America ‘Trapped’ by False Narratives, Robert Parry reminds us how the media is aiding and abetting the disastrous path we are following in Libya.

Regarding Libya, the major U.S. news media already is repeating many of the journalistic errors made in the early phases of previous conflicts against regimes led by U.S.-designated villains.

For instance, NBC spent much of Monday touting a story from “intelligence sources” about a supposed intercept of a Libyan government communiqué ordering bodies from the morgue to be scattered near sites of U.S. aerial bombings. When reporters found no evidence that this tactic was actually being used, NBC correspondents gave themselves credit for heading it off.

No attention was given to the other possibility – that U.S. propaganda experts or the Libyan opposition had planted the intercept story as a tactic to whip up more animosity toward the Libyan government and to deflect criticism of the U.S. bombings if they did kill large numbers of civilians.

Despite the lack of evidence that Muammar Gaddafi has targeted and slaughtered Libyan civilians or had any intention to do so, we use this as an excuse for yet another military intervention.  If it worked to rescue George W. Bush’s failing administration, perhaps Barack Obama figures it can rescue his.  I am so tired of getting exactly what I voted against.  If I were a believer in evil conspiracies, I might think some power has threatened Obama so frighteningly that he has agreed to go along with policies that he abhors.