Let's Watch '60 Minutes' Segment On Salvador Torture Camp That Bari Weiss Didn't Want Us To See
Can't say it would have been improved by Stephen Miller lying about it.
On Sunday, CBS News Commissar Bari Weiss spiked a 60 Minutes segment on the torture inflicted on the 252 Venezuelan immigrants the Trump sent to El Salvador’s infamous CECOT prison without due process. But as it happened, the Canadian network Global TV had already received and scheduled the full 60 Minutes episode to run on its website and app. Well, oops, Weiss apparently forgot to send a kill notice to Global TV (or didn’t even know how CBS content is distributed normally).
Before Global TV substituted the program with an episode that had been shorn of its 13-minute “A” block, numerous nerds had already downloaded the segment and posted it to the interwebs on platforms like YouTube, Reddit, and TikTok. CBS News responded by furiously playing Takedown Notice Whack-a-Mole, but the video is out there on the Internet Archive and elsewhere. Hooray for the digital Streisand Effect!
Under fair use and commentary, here’s the segment, hosted by reporter Sharyn Alfonsi, that was supposed to run in the US Sunday, until Weiss decided it needed to be improved by adding in lies from administration sources. (As you’ll see, it already notes that nobody from the government would agree to comment.) Please watch all 13 minutes if you can stand it, if only because so much effort has already gone into keeping you from seeing it.
As many people have also pointed out, we live in a weird Soviet-Lite version of the United States of America now, where in order to see a bootleg news report killed by a wannabe State TV network, we have to rely on broadcasters in other countries. So far, it doesn’t yet look like Trump is planning an American version of China’s Great Firewall, but hey, he no doubt has people working on it.
It’s solid reporting, featuring interviews with two of the Venezuelan immigrants shipped off to CECOT without so much as a court hearing. One, Luis Munoz Pinto, now living in Colombia, told Alfonsi how he’d used the CBP One app to make an appointment so he could cross the border and request asylum in 2024. Yes, that does mean he was not an ILLEGAL, or at least not until he got to his interview with ICE, where he was immediately imprisoned because he had tattoos.
“They just looked at me and told me I was a danger to society,” he said. “I never even had a traffic ticket.” He explained that he didn’t belong to any gang, but the agent simply replied, “But you are Venezuelan,” and that meant he had to be in Tren de Aragua. Bonus points to Alfonsi for noting that criminologists who study gangs agree that TdA members typically don’t get tattoos, unlike El Salvador’s MS-13.
On arrival at CECOT, Munoz Pinto says, the director of the prison told them, “Welcome to hell. I’ll make sure you never leave.” And it was hell, as Munoz Pinto recalled: “The torture was never-ending. Interminable. There was blood everywhere, screams, people crying, people who couldn’t take it and were urinating or vomiting on themselves.”
A second former detainee at CECOT, William Losada Sanchez, told about “the island,” an isolation cell where prisoners were sent to be punished for minor offenses, including the “offense” of falling down while being forced to kneel in a stress position for hours at a time.
“The island is a little room where there’s no light, no ventilation, nothing. It’s a cell for punishment where you can’t see your hand in front of your face,” Losada Sanchez said. “After they locked us in, they came to beat us every half hour and they pounded on the door with their sticks to traumatize us.”
But that’s OK, because after all they were all ILLEGAL, even the prisoners who were here legally but who stopped being legal when an ICE agent didn’t like their tattoos.
The segment also features Juan Pappier, a deputy director of Human Rights Watch, who contributed to a November report that found a pattern of “systematic torture” at CECOT. That report’s review of available ICE records found that nearly half of the immigrants the US sent to CECOT had no criminal records in the US or Venezuela.
Weiss thought pointing that out was terribly biased, and that the segment should have emphasized that slightly over half did have criminal records — though there again, as Alfonsi notes, ICE’s records indicate that a lot of those “crimes” were related to their immigration status. ICE’s records identified only eight who had been convicted of violent crimes, about three percent of those sent away to be tortured daily for the rest of their lives.
After she killed the piece, Weiss apparently offered staff at 60 Minutes Stephen Miller’s contact info so he could provide the proper administration lies about the Venezuelans sent to CECOT. We’re not sure how that would have differed from the segment’s clip of Karolyn Leavitt insisting the detainees were “heinous monsters, rapists, murderers, kidnappers, sexual assaulters, predators who have no right to be in this country, and they must be held accountable.”
But surely Miller would have added so much more, like focusing solely on the eight prisoners convicted of violent crimes, which he could have, if only given the chance, described as luridly as possible, and to insist they were typical of the other 244 prisoners, who were surely monsters. Or he could have just made horrifying shit up, because he’s not in a courtroom and who would have stopped him?
Ultimately, as we now know, the Venezuelans sent to CECOT actually did see the light of day again after the story blew up in the administration’s face, part of the larger reaction against Trump’s ethnic cleansing agenda. To make the story go away, Trump arranged to have the men sent to CECOT repatriated to Venezuela, in exchange for 10 American citizens. Heck, 60 Minutes didn’t even mention that one of the Americans was an actual factual convicted triple-murderer who was subsequently released in Florida, and who is now Crom only knows where.
Maybe some other network will cover that story, merry Christmas.
[CBC / Charlotte’s Web Thoughts / Daily Beast / Human Rights Watch]
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It's almost like the rest of the world should set up a Radio Free America for us.
<...we live in a weird Soviet-Lite version of the United States of America>
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You don't know how this is OK, boy
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