CBS News pulls report on “brutal and torturous conditions” at El Salvador prison where Donald Trump Administration sent deportees

The full segment was “accidentally” uploaded to global feeds and captured in Canada!

https://www.404media.co/archivists-posted-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment-bari-weiss-killed/

https://www.muellershewrote.com/p/watch-the-60-minutes-cecot-segment

The good news is, Alfonsi is already on the record taking a stand against this. That memo is unambiguous. If Weiss was hoping to quietly sweep this under the rug, she’s already got more than she bargained for.

Here’s hoping someone will find a way to air the report, with or without CBS’s approval. If anybody understands the table stakes, Alfonsi should.

Highly disturbing to hear. The most benign explanation I can think of is that it was deemed too depressing with Christmas this week, and they wanted to stave off potential feuds at holiday gatherings in the name of Christmas spirit. But I sincerely doubt that. This has to be political.

I hope this report sees the light of day. If not on 60 Minutes in the near future, then for it to be leaked through other sources.

If it tells anyone where my hope is right now ... When the reports come out of the atrocities we do in our own country, and they're not from major news sources, or they're rumor mills, or they're being downplayed by CBS or NBC or The Washington Post....

Please believe them.

Here's an Atlantic article about the topic. Cancel Culture’s Boomerang Effect
How we got to a place where free speech means whatever conservatives want to say.

The article is kind of blaming political correctness as a doorway to this suppression of free speech. It's kind of correct, but also kind of wrong and doesn't seem to understand the paradox of tolerance. Anyway, here is the meat of the article:

Every society that has ever existed has had views that are mainstream and views that are fringe. The free-speech frauds who captured the discourse over the past decade understood this, but their true objection was that they did not unilaterally have the power to define which was which. For example, in a 2018 Times column, Weiss complained that “leftists” were engaged in a “concerted attempt to significantly redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” This was meant to sound sinister, menacing. In fact, this is politics. Every faction is always trying to “redraw the bounds of acceptable thought and speech.” In a free society, the government allows people to have those arguments. Such disputes are not a threat to free speech; they are free speech.

When I say that CBS News’s Bari Weiss understood this, you needn’t take my word for it. In November, shortly after being given the reins to one of the oldest broadcast-news organizations in the country, Weiss used identical language to describe her own project: “I think it’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture,” Weiss said at the Jewish Leadership Conference. “And I don’t mean that in, like, a censorious, gatekeeping way.”

What’s the difference between her “redrawing the lines” of acceptable speech and other people doing it? What makes one “censorious” and “gatekeeping” and the other not? Well, because she gets to decide. That’s what so much of the free-speech panic was ever about: making sure the right people were in charge of what you see, hear, and read. Notably, this has very little to do with reporting the news, which is supposed to be what CBS News does. But if the point of installing Weiss was to ensure that she would gatekeep on behalf of right-wing interests, that is precisely what she appears to be doing.

In that 2018 column, Weiss complained that so many people seemed to believe that “the real cause for concern are the secret authoritarians passing as liberals and conservatives in our midst.” Seems like they were right to be concerned. Upon reflection, her conclusion that misguided leftists were focusing on minor issues when there were true threats to freedom of speech was prescient. It applies neatly to the campus PC obsession that helped elevate Weiss to a position where she could block the publication of a story about the United States government rendering men to an overseas gulag without trial.

Here is a related article from September. We should appreciate the people who leak and share suppressed information and protest what is happening.
Lower than Cowards
The surrender of America’s elites

One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitability and invincibility.

The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff. ICE detainees such as the Palestinian-rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, have continued to speak publicly about the administration’s abuses. These are people who stand to lose their homes, their freedom, their families, and they are showing more courage than people who have summer homes and trust funds. Protesters continue to show up in the streets, risking being brutalized by armed agents of the state. In Washington, D.C., citizens called to serve on grand juries have refused to indict people accused by the Trump administration of political crimes.

The people, it turns out, are far more courageous than their leaders.