My Take | From inflicting pain at the CIA to selling beauty and pleasure
- Retired CIA operative of ‘enhanced interrogation’ and ‘extraordinary rendition’ finds new business promoting women’s beauty and life experience
Call it transferring a skill set from one domain of life to another. In this case, though, it’s going from enhanced interrogation techniques, aka, torture, to beauty-and-life coaching.
In an exclusive interview, Reuters has revealed how Alfreda Scheuer, the former deputy chief of Homeland and Strategic Threats, has become a professional life coach. It makes you wonder how her client sessions work: role playing at waterboarding; applying interrogation techniques in job interviews; cardio exercising in locks, stocks and chains?
Scheuer, by the way, was the CIA operative who inspired the 2012 warmongering torture porn of a movie, Zero Dark Thirty. This is how Rolling Stone magazine describes her: “The CIA’s ‘torture queen’ is now a life coach hawking beauty products. Alfreda Scheuer – who built her career on abduction, interrogation, and torture while helping inspire [Hollywood actress] Jessica Chastain’s character in Zero Dark Thirty – wants you to have radiant skin.”
Only in America! At a time when Washington and its allies are clamouring to implicate Russian President Vladimir Putin as a war criminal – he probably is one – you have to ask what should happen, assuming the same standard of international justice, to those Americans who gave the world “the war on terror”.
Scheuer’s new business is called YBeU Beauty, which focuses on helping women to “look good, feel good, and do good”, according to its webpage.
It offers a brief bio: “I had finished a three decades + career as a senior government executive leading teams, mostly females, tasked with no-fail missions, taking smart risks, and even making life-and-death decisions. I loved every minute of it.”
When asked about torture, sorry, enhanced interrogation, by Reuters, she said it was all done professionally and without joy. I am not making this up. This is what she said, and I quote: “I’m proud that I wasn’t on the sidelines … I won’t get into the details of what I saw … We took it as a solemn duty to get to the truth to save other lives. Everyone I saw conducted themselves with the utmost professionalism. It doesn’t mean I took any joy in it.” At least she wasn’t a sadist!