thenation | A central player in the Bush-Cheney’s torture program is Jose A. Rodriguez, who, according to The New York Times,
was then the head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center during the worst
of the barbarity—the rectal hummus flushes, drills, dogs, broken limbs,
sexual humiliation and assault, sleep deprivation, intense heat,
intense cold, blood thinners, beatings and deaths from exposure. When
agents in the field began sending e-mails to voice dismay, Rodriguez
told them to shut up: “Strongly urge that any speculative language as to
the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as
to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity
agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be
refrained from in written traffic (email or cable traffic).” “Such
language is not helpful,” he said. Rodriguez was involved in an earlier
scandal regarding Bush-Cheney torture, fingered for destroying “videotapes recording the interrogations of top al Qaeda operatives.”
Rodriguez was born in Puerto Rico and joined the CIA in 1976.
Nineteen seventy-six was a key year in the evolution of the national
security state—the high point of congressional efforts to rein in the
imperial presidency (Gerald Ford was forced to sign
his “no assassinations of foreign leaders’ pledge that year) and the
start of the New Right’s efforts to build a workaround those regulations
(i.e., Iran/Contra). Rodriguez spent most of his career in Latin
America, bridging the Cold War and the war on drugs. His background is
sketchy—there’s not too much public information on what he was doing
where in Latin America and his autobiography is vague. According to the The Wall Street Journal,
Rodriguez “is a product of what one former agency colleague called ‘the
rough and tumble’ Latin American division, which was responsible for
thwarting Russian aggression in that part of the world. That strategy
eventually evolved into the Iran/Contra scandal.” The Latin American
Division was thick
into Iran/Contra, and Rodriguez was involved in Panama when Noriega was
in charge, that is, at the height of the scandal. He was in Mexico in
1990, where he served as CIA station chief at the beginning of that
country’s descent into narco-NAFTA madness.
After 9/11, he was tapped by the CIA to manage its torture program—even though he didn’t speak Arabic and had no experience in the Middle East. He apparently had other talents. Mark Mazzetti in the Times writes
that he “won praise while in the job for an aggressive strategy to
capture, detain and interrogate leaders of Al Qaeda.” Rodriguez’s
promotion to a top slot in Washington’s torture program is a pretty
stark example of Latin America’s serving as “empire’s workshop.” Elsewhere, I’ve given an overview
of the torture techniques the United States helped work out in Latin
America during the Cold War (as have others, including Patrice McSherry here). These included waterboarding, a technique called, in Spanish, “el submarino.” (After a 1992 investigation, the Pentagon destroyed copies of the seven infamous torture instruction manuals it had used to train Latin American allies; Marcy Wheeler, though, writes that Dick Cheney and his legal counsel, David Addington “saved the only known copies” for their personal files).
More recently, though, with the return of the Latin American left to political power, the region has refused
to participate in Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld’s global torture archipelago,
that is, its extraordinary rendition program, which implicated every
region of the globe, even peace-loving Scandinavia, except South
America.
As for Rodriguez, after he retired from the CIA he went private, walking through that “revolving door”
that connects Langley to any one of those Virginia-based private
security companies (Blackwater apparently recruited him, but he chose
another firm). In any case, he is back in the public eye, writing one op-ed after another defending torture. “I know it worked,” he insists,
contrary to critics who say that forced rectal flushing garnered no
serviceable intelligence. He’s joined other former CIA officials to set
up a webpage to push back on criticism: CIASavedLives.com.
