FRONTLINE/World
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/- This Week: "Extraordinary Rendition" and "A Second Opinion" (60 minutes),
Tuesday, November 6th at 9pm on PBS (check local listings)
- Live Discussion: Chat with investigative reporter Stephen Grey Nov. 7, at 11 am ET
This week, we turn our newsletter over to Stephen Talbot, series editor of our international news magazine, FRONTLINE/World --
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With all the debate in Washington about "waterboarding" -- and the upcoming vote on the nominee for attorney general -- our episode of FRONTLINE/World this Tuesday night is right on target.
Our lead story, "Extraordinary Rendition," is an investigation into the CIA's controversial, extra-legal practice of seizing terrorist suspects abroad and transporting them to third countries for interrogation in jails where torture is common.
Investigative reporter Stephen Grey has been pursuing this story for four years. The author of "Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture and Rendition Program," Grey breaks new ground in this report, interviewing an Iraqi-born British resident who was flown on a CIA-chartered Gulfstream jet to a secret interrogation site in Afghanistan known as the "dark prison."
He also uncovers evidence of a rendition that took place earlier this year in the Horn of Africa, involving the detention of women and children in what appears to be a failed attempt to smoke out the mastermind of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.Grey interviews former CIA and FBI officials who were active in the hunt for Al Qaeda leaders and other suspected terrorists around the world. He finds that many U.S. agents who were involved in extraordinary renditions are now worried about the legal and political consequences of the program, which was denounced in a recent Council of Europe investigation that exposed CIA "black site" prisons in Romania and Poland.
It is a gripping and disturbing report. For those of you who have seen the new movie, "Rendition," it may seem eerily similar. But this is fact not fiction and President Bush has signed a new executive order allowing the CIA to continue to question terrorist suspects in secret jails. "A Second Opinion"
In our second story, veteran reporter T.R. Reid takes a very different journey, seeking to cure his aching shoulder through the ancient Indian brand of medicine known as Ayurveda. At a clinic in Coimbatore in southern India, Reid submits himself to a regimen of oily massages, mud packs, caustic eye drops and bitter herbal concoctions. Other patients opt for leeches.
Known for his humorous commentaries on National Public Radio and his reporting for The Washington Post, the 60-something Reid is skeptical about the treatment, but he's eager to find an alternative to the high-tech shoulder surgery proposed by his doctor back home in Colorado.
In the end, Reid discovers something about faith, the placebo effect, and health care in another country at a time when Indian researchers have teamed up with the UCLA Medical School to see if their 3,000-year-old healing art is better than Western medicine for the treatment of rheumatoid arthritis.
"Rough Cut"
Our broadcast this week ends with a sampling of online videos we call "Rough Cuts." One of them, "Libya: Out of the Shadow" won an Emmy last month at the 28th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Awards in New York. (FRONTLINE/World also won an Emmy for our broadcast report, "Iraq: Saddam's Road to Hell.") We have made a special effort to debut original, high-quality video reports on our Web site, so we are pleased that the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences chose to recognize our work.
Take a look at our latest "video dispatch" from Burma -- dramatic raw footage from the crackdown last month in Rangoon. And remember -- you can watch all our broadcast reports anytime on our Web site, where you also can explore in-depth features about the CIA's shadowy war on terror, and tell us what you think about our "stories from a small planet."
Sincerely,
Stephen Talbot
Series Editor
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/ --------------------------
+ Live Online Discussion on Washingtonpost.com ...
Catch investigative reporter Stephen Grey online this Wednesday, Nov. 7, at 11am ET, to discuss "Extraordinary Rendition."
For details, see:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2007/11/01/DI2007110101583.html----------------------------