The Torture Report
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 13 December 2014
⏱️ 16 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
“The stain from this scandal is one of the worst ever in the history of the C.I.A., and from my standpoint one of the worst in the country,” Jane Mayer says of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on C.I.A. interrogation tactics. Mayer joins her fellow New Yorker staff writer Steve Coll and Amelia Lester, an editor for the magazine, on this week’s Political Scene podcast to talk about the report and its political significance. They discuss the unreliability of information obtained through torture and the unlikeliness of anyone being held accountable for the treatment of detainees. “I don’t think there’s any prospect of reviving criminal investigations in the United States,” Coll says.
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| 0:44.1 | Things people love. |
| 0:47.7 | This is The Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about politics. |
| 0:53.0 | It's Friday, December 12th. I'm |
| 0:55.2 | Amelia Lester in this week for Dorothy Wicenden. I've said repeatedly that America doesn't torture, |
| 1:01.6 | and I'm going to make sure that we don't torture. That was President-elect Barack Obama on 60 |
| 1:06.7 | minutes back in 2008. On Tuesday, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its long-awaited |
| 1:13.0 | report on the CIA's detention and interrogation program and its extensive use of torture |
| 1:18.6 | during the Bush administration. In his response to the report, Obama was careful not to attack |
| 1:24.3 | the CIA. There were a lot of people who did a lot of things right and worked very |
| 1:27.9 | hard to keep us safe. But I think that any fair-minded person looking at this would say some |
| 1:33.5 | terrible mistakes were made. That was Obama speaking on Univision. To talk about the torture |
| 1:38.6 | report and its political implications, a Jane Mayer and Steve Cole. Jane, you were one of the first journalists to write |
| 1:46.0 | about the detention and interrogation program, and a lot of the information in the Senate report |
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