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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