![]() But this documentary is much more than an exercise in video wonkery. ![]() The policy debates in Crosshairs are both cogent and framed in real-world terms rather than lofty moral generalities. (They also note that the Senate seems curiously unconcerned about either the morality or the intelligence-gathering effectiveness of Obama's thousands of drone assassinations.) And, Tenet and others say, the rough stuff did produce valuable information, notwithstanding the findings of a sharply divided Senate committee to the contrary. "These are the hardened, worst terrorists, responsible for the deaths of thousands of Americans, in a period where we simply didn't believe we had time to become their best friends," says George Tenet, who served under Clinton and George W. … It's a long process."īut time, say several of the directors who rose through the clandestine ranks, was what the CIA-already widely accused of an "intelligence disaster"-didn't have in the wake of 9/11. "If it's cruel, we shouldn't be doing it." Obama appointee David Petraeus, who had plenty of experience with prisoner interrogations during his 37 years in the army, doubts the efficacy of torture: "If you want information from a detainee, you become his best friend. "Our constitution does prohibit cruel and unusual punishment," says William Webster, a former federal judge and FBI director appointed CIA chief by Ronald Reagan. The CIA directors who spent most of their careers elsewhere before being appointed to head the agency vigorously disapprove of it. That's particularly true in the lengthy debate over waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other forms of "enhanced interrogation" that look, to the non-national-security eye, remarkably like torture. Other times there is rambunctious (albeit long-distance the interviews were conducted separately) disagreement among the officials themselves. He's interrupted by a producer who suggests an alternative explanation: "You wanted to be able to abuse this guy, you didn't want any rules." Retorts the CIA man with some heat: "Bullshit!" Jose Rodriguez, the agency's former chief of operations, is explaining that its so-called black sites-secret prisons where captured Al-Qaeda suspects were brutally interrogated-were used because they were more secure than other possible locations. "The old way would have been to put them in the back of a truck and shoot them," he says. ![]() John Deutch, one of Bill Clinton's CIA directors, asked about the indefinite confinement of Al Qaeda suspects at Guantanamo Bay, bluntly calls it a humanitarian advance. There is probably some lying going on in Crosshairs (though probably no more, and possibly even less, than if you interviewed a dozen randomly chosen members of Congress) and certainly some spinning.īut there's also surprising candor. The result is a fascinating window into the thinking at the top of a compulsively secret agency that has been the spearhead of the war on terror. A dozen men who have headed the CIA-including John Brennan, the current director-appear on camera in Crosshairs, granting searching interviews on the agency's part in the war on terror over the past two decades. "I don't believe these directors are talking about this stuff!" he says in a tone of wonder.Īnd yet they are, and not in background sessions with friendly reporters that will dribble out in unattributed quotes that can safely be denied, either. As the production crew prepares to take a break, Morrell shakes his head incredulously. ![]() Morrell, earnest and cooperative until now, declares flatly that he's not going to say a word about signature strikes. Pardon the unintended wordplay, but the signature moment of Showtime's remarkable new documentary, The Spymasters- CIA In The Crosshairs, comes near its end, when a producer asks Mike Morrell, the agency's former acting director, about the implications of what are known in the killer-drone biz as "signature strikes"-missile attacks on unidentified people not because they're known terrorists, but because a drone operator thinks they might be based on the fact that they're carrying weapons or otherwise behaving suspiciously.
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