![]() It’s fascinating to hear them spin their self-justifying anecdotes, offer their guarded and evasive mea culpas and mouth their pseudo-sophisticated clichés, but my general feeling is that we know even less after they’re done talking than we did before. In fact they reminded me of Jesuit priests, a soft-spoken, pasty-faced brotherhood of white dudes with elite educations and deep roots in the arcane national security apparatus. But as human specimens they’re all pretty much of a piece, the way archbishops or bank presidents are. Those guys don’t all agree about everything, and a few of them clearly feel the agency has gone badly off the rails in the era of “extraordinary rendition” and drone warfare. Stansfield Turner (1977-81) and up to John Brennan, the current incumbent. He bears little resemblance to the dozen CIA directors interviewed in the film, all the way back to Adm. Simultaneously charismatic and chilling, Rodriguez is one of the stars of “The Spymasters: CIA in the Crosshairs,” an addictive if perplexing documentary that premieres this weekend on Showtime. “We waterboarded three guys,” Rodriguez scoffs. They generally stopped the procedure after 10 seconds or so (that point is a little vague). They used small amounts of water, not gallons at a time, to provoke the desired sensation that a detainee was drowning. Our guys always had doctors on hand to make sure nobody died, he says. Some people may have understood Kathryn Bigelow's “Zero Dark Thirty” as a pro-CIA movie, but Rodriguez assures us its depiction of waterboarding as brutal and nightmarish was “total bullshit.” Yeah, that venerable technique of “enhanced interrogation” has been used as torture at other times in history, Rodriguez admits, including by the Nazis, the Soviets and the witch-hunters of the Spanish Inquisition. José Rodriguez is a Harley-riding hardass who spent many years as a clandestine counter-terrorism operative in the Central Intelligence Agency, and he’s sick to death of hearing people whine about waterboarding.
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