CBS News' decision to spike a story on its flagship "60 Minutes" about the efforts of President Donald Trump's administration to deport people to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador stunned one Democratic analyst.
Cliff Schecter, a political ad man who worked on President Joe Biden's 2020 campaign, wrote in a new essay on Substack on Tuesday that the decision by CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss to cancel the story showed the administration is "lying about something horrific." Weiss said she pulled the segment because it was "not ready" and needed an on-camera appearance by someone in the Trump administration.
Schecter argued that the story was pulled because it showed the Trump administration has "outsourced torture carried out with American money, American authority, and deliberate deniability."
"This is not an isolated foreign human rights scandal. It is a U.S. policy story," Schecter argued. "According to the report, the United States paid El Salvador millions of dollars to house the men, after branding them 'terrorists' under a revived wartime authority that doesn’t even have a whiff of due process. Independent investigations found that nearly half had no criminal history, and only a tiny fraction had ever been convicted of violent offenses."
"U.S. government databases themselves contradict the claims used to justify their removal," the essay continued. "In other words: the U.S. sent people it knew were likely innocent into conditions it had already documented as torturous. These f------ people are monsters."
