“I was told, if those videotapes had ever been seen, the reaction around the world would not have been survivable,” Jane Mayer, investigative journalist for The New Yorker, says on the new FRONTLINE documentary Secrets, Politics and Torture.
Watch the show here. From PBS/WGBH:
When graphic photographs of American soldiers abusing detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq surfaced in 2004, they sparked international outrage — and prompted new scrutiny of how the U.S. treats its prisoners.
Even though Abu Ghraib itself wasn’t a CIA-run facility, the agency was worried about the scandal’s ramifications.
That’s because the CIA was in possession of something that was potentially more explosive than the detainee abuse photos: hundreds of hours of videotaped “enhanced interrogations” of two Al Qaeda suspects in CIA detention, that included the use of techniques widely described as torture.
“Secrets, Politics and Torture”