(updated below)

Jose Rodriguez, the high-ranking CIA official who ordered the destruction of 92 videos showing the agency’s interrogation of Terrorist suspects, was interviewed on Sunday night about his new pro-torture book by 60 Minutes (that show’s network, CBS, and the publisher of Rodriguez’s new book, Simon & Schuster, are both owned by the CBS Corp., now synergistically profiting off of torture advocacy). There is an important lesson to be learned from this interview.

As many commenters correctly noted, the torture-defending Rodriguez is clearly a crazed sociopath (of the distinctly banal type identified by Hannah Arendt). At Esquire, Charles Pierce has a perfect post about all of this, writing: “I’m pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac” (his first paragraph, on the Obama administration’s serial protection of these war criminals, is a must-read). The New Yorker’s Amy Davidson notes that Rodriguez did not even bother to defend torture as a necessary evil but rather “bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer” (indeed, Rodriguez’ claim that authorizing torturing meant people in government were willing to “put their big boy pants on” exposed a whole new level of psychosexual creepiness). Andrew Sullivan says Rodriguez is “a war criminal” who “has no shame about any of this, and intends to make money off it.”

All of that is true, but the key point here is that Rodriguez — with all of his sociopathic, maniacal, proud war criminality — wasn’t some low-level rogue officer unrepresentative of the CIA. The opposite is true: he spent his career at that agency and advanced continuously, rising to lead what The Washington Post‘s Dana Priest this week called “the Central Intelligence Agency’s all-powerful operations directorate,” located “at the center of the universe at the agency.” He was essentially in charge of clandestine operations, including the CIA’s torture, rendition, black site and detention programs. And the criminal programs he is “sociopathically” defending were ones that were embraced by the highest levels of the U.S. Government, authorized by its Department of Justice, and protected from investigation and prosecution by the current administration. Rodriguez — sociopathy and all – isn’t some aberration in the U.S. Government’s intelligence and paramilitary world: he’s its symbol.

As so many people react with revulsion to the mindset of Jose Rodriguez, perhaps this is a good time to stop and realize why it’s so dangerous and wrong to trust the Executive Branch to exert the most extreme powers — of assassination, indefinite detention, rendition, surveillance — in the dark, with no oversight, constraints or transparency. Those of you who are content to have the Executive Branch decide — without checks or transparency — who lives and dies, who is free and imprisoned, who is entitled to due process and who isn’t, are putting your blind faith in the Jose Rodriguezes of the world.

Even people who don’t originally assume that level of unchecked power in a corrupted and sociopathic state can (and will) easily be transformed by it. That’s the inherently corrupting nature of unchecked power — of human nature — that led the American founders to insist on multiple levels of burdensome checks whenever power of this sort is exercised. Jose Rodriguez — his actions and mentality — is the inevitable fruit of placing faith and trust in the Goodness of American Executive Branch officials to exercise the world’s most awesome powers without any meaningful scrutiny and limits.

Yesterday, President Obama’s chief counter-terrorism adviser, John Brennan, gave a speech in which he purported to provide more “transparency” with regard to the Obama drone program. But he did nothing of the sort. Instead — while justifying everything the Government does with the standard mantra: “We are at war . . . Yes, war is hell.  It is awful.  It involves human beings killing other human beings, sometimes innocent civilians” — he offered a series of empty platitudes ensuring us all that “President Obama has demanded that we hold ourselves to the highest possible standards and processes” when it comes to the drone program. Whenever someone in the Executive Branch proposes a candidate for summary death, he said, officials “consider all the information available to us, carefully, responsibly”; “these efforts are overseen with extraordinary care and thoughtfulness”; and they “only authorize a strike if we have a high degree of confidence that innocent civilians will not be injured or killed, except in the rarest of circumstances.”