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The War Profiteers - War Crimes, Kidnappings,
Torture and Big Money |
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April 20th,
2007 - A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions |
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A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on
Secret Abductions By Jeff Stein Congressional Quarterly April 20, 2007 Could saying “I’m sorry”
save the CIA from a public perdition in the war on terror? It was an idea that flitted
through a revealing and sometimes even bizarre hearing last week on the Bush
administration’s “extraordinary renditions” program, which uses
“extra-judicial” means to sweep al Qaeda suspects off the street. Along the way, the panel’s
top Republican suggested that President Bush had “a personality problem”; a
top former CIA officer said that renowned FBI agent John O’Neill deserved to
die at the World Trade Center; and a one-time U.S. diplomat disrupted the
proceedings by jumping up and saying, “I don’t have to stand for this.” But the immediate focus of
the April 17 joint hearing of two House Foreign Affairs committees was a
report by the European Parliament that labeled the CIA’s abduction program
illegal and alleged that torture was being applied inside an archipelago of
secret prisons across the continent. Three European delegates
were invited to expand on the findings by the hearing’s chairman,
Massachusetts Democrat Bill Delahunt. Italian delegate Carlo Fava
called the rendition program “an illegal instrument used by the United States
in the fight against terrorism.” Jonathan Evans, a British
parliamentarian who headed the delegation, complained that “as legislators,
we’ve been excluded” from knowing what’s happening on their own soil. Julianne Smith, a top
European expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told
the panel the program of “extraordinary rendition, along with the press
revelations about secret U.S. prisons in Europe, have cast a dark shadow on
our relationship with our European allies.” Such talk has infuriated the
CIA, whose boss, Michael V. Hayden denounced European “hypocrisy” at a
private luncheon last month hosted by the German embassy, according to a leak
in The Washington Post. European governments have not only known about, Hayden
complained, but approved - and in most cases collaborated in - the CIA’s
snatches. Skewer But last week it fell to
Michael Scheuer, the CIA officer who launched the program in 1995 under the
Clinton administration, to offer the most combative, public defense yet of
the renditions, calling them “the single most effective counterterrorism
operation ever conducted by the United States government.” “Mistakes may well have been
made during my tenure as the chief of CIA’s bin Laden operations,” said
Scheuer,who, somewhat ironically, arrived at the hearing with a well-deserved
reputation for skewering the Bush administration. In his 2004 book “Imperial
Hubris,” Scheuer called the attack on Iraq “an avaricious, premeditated,
unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat, but whose defeat
offered economic advantages.” But in the Rayburn
building’s elegant hearing room last week, Scheuer stoutly defended the
abduction program and attacked its critics. “If there were errors” and
innocent people were picked up, he said, “they are my responsibility. ... Intelligence
information is not the equivalent of court-room-quality evidence, and it
never will be.” Briskly reading a prepared
statement, the bearded erstwhile operative denounced the parliamentary report,
calling Europe “the earth’s single largest terrorist safe haven.” “The EU’s policy of easily
attainable political asylum and its prohibition against deporting wanted or
convicted terrorists to countries with the death penalty have made Europe a
major, consistent, and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United
States,” he asserted. But Scheuer’s main intent
seemed to deflect criticism from the CIA and lay it at the feet of senior
White House officials and CIA lawyers, who he said approve every snatch
proposed by the counterterrorism unit. In doing so, he provided
listeners with a rare public glimpse into what one long-ago CIA
official-turned-critic, Victor Marchetti, called the “clandestine mentality,”
an anything-goes mindset that separates CIA people from their brethren in the
FBI, a law enforcement agency, and the Pentagon, whose spies for the most
part are bound by military oaths. “Sir, a half-assed
bureaucrat like me,” he told Delahunt, the panel’s chairman, “is never going
to take a prisoner anywhere in this world without the authority of the
executive branch.” And if the CIA gets the
wrong man, he asserted, it’s not really the CIA operators’ fault. “Each and every target of a
rendition was vetted by a battery of lawyers at CIA and not infrequently by
lawyers at the National Security Council and the Department of Justice,” he
said, following “a written brief citing and explaining the intelligence
information that made the rendition target a threat to the United States
and/or its allies.” “If mistakes were made,” he
went on to say, “I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and
confusing business .” Protecting Americans “should
always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether
or not the intelligence data is air tight.” Apologize The parliamentary report
featured a handful of cases of mistaken identity, the most prominent of which
was the ordeal of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen suspected of terrorist ties
and packed off to his native Syria in 2002. Upon his release 375 days
later, Arar said he had been brutally tortured. The Canadian government,
which had supplied U.S. intelligence with a dossier that prompted Arar’s
detention in New York, reinvestigated his case, cleared him of all suspicion,
issued him an apology and awarded him $11.5 million in compensation. But the the CIA, Scheuer
said under persistent questioning from the panel’s Democrats, owes neither
Arar nor any other innocents picked up an apology. “No, and if I had the same
information sheet today, I’d go after him,” Scheuer said. “But the Canadians say
there’s absolutely no evidence,” countered Edward J. Markey, D-Mass. “I would certainly not
apologize to him, sir.” If anything, the finger of
blame should land on the Canadian government for “providing us with
information that was incorrect,” he said. But the panel was barking up
the wrong tree, he insisted. It should be asking higher officials about
mistakes and compensation. “You’re forgetting that the
CIA is a service organization that responds to the demands of the government
whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power,” he said. “It’s their
decision, and it’s Congress’s decision. If they want to sign onto an agreement
that prevents the United States from defending itself, then they should do
that and worry about defending their decision.” The CIA , he added, is not
“in the business of cleaning up afterwards. We’re in the business of
pre-emption.” But, Delahunt persisted,
“What about those who are clearly eventually determined to be innocent?” “Mistakes are made, sir.” “Mistakes are made.” “Yes, sir. And if you can
prove that there was not due diligence in designing the target package or
assembling the information (for) that operation. . . then you have a case
against someone. Otherwise, it’s a mistake.” “It’s just a mistake.” “That’s right,” Scheuer
said. “They’re not Americans, and I really don’t care.” He spread his arms,
smiling. “It’s just a mistake.” “And if they’re not
Americans,” Delahunt persisted, “you really don’t care.” He shuffled some
papers. “That’s very interesting.” The witness and the
congressman seemed to be talking across a vast universe. “I never got paid, sir, to
be a citizen of the world,” Scheuer said. “Maybe you do.” California’s Dana
Rohrabacher, the panel’s top Republican, had invited Scheuer to testify, and
didn’t miss the chance to needle Democrats about the CIA man’s
anti-administration credentials. Rohrabacher offered that he
was “very sympathetic” about people wrongly pirated away by U.S.
intelligence. There should be some mechanism to prevent that, he said. And yes, suggested
Rohrabacher, who had been an aide in the Reagan White House, maybe President
Bush should apologize for the mistakes to put them behind us. But Bush seemed to have a
“personality problem” with apologies, Rohrabacher said, frowning. “I have worked in the White
House and have seen first executives up close and in very many different
administrations,” he added, leaving it at that. But when Rohrabacher laced
into the European parliamentarians, mocking and dismissing their concerns
over “due process” and other legal niceties, the hearing room roiled. “Here we’ve got a fellow who
said he was tortured at Guantanamo,” Rohrabacher said, tapping a document.
“How do we know that he was tortured? Probably because he said he was
tortured. Why give the benefit of the doubt to people involved with the
Taliban?” “I think,” said Sarah
Ludford, vice-chairwoman of the parliamentary committee, leaning into the
microphone and offering a well known detail of the case, “one of the sources
was the FBI.” Rohrabacher fumed. “We’re at war ... wouldn’t
Europeans have supported the rendition of (Adolph) Eichmann?” he asked,
referring to the notorious Nazi fugitive that Israeli commandos snatched in
Buenas Aires. “I’m not sure the Eichmann
example is a good one,” softly offered Evans, the British parliamentarian.
Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel, not whisked off to a secret prison,
he reminded. Roar Rohrabacher tried another
avenue. The CIA had made “maybe three” mistaken arrests, he told the
Europeans. Weren’t they maybe obsessing
over “due process”? he said. Their concern for civil rights could have “the
unfortunate consequence” of helping al Qaeda kill tens of thousands of people
in London. At that, the Code Pink
ladies in orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits who had sat quietly through the
hearing began clucking in a “can-you-believe that ?” way. The
parliamentarians’ jaws cracked open. Now Rohrabacher was really
annoyed. “Well then,” he barked, “I
hope it’s your families. I hope it’s your families that suffer the
consequences.” A roar went up. One of the
orange jumpsuiters, a grandmotherly woman with a “no torture” sign, pushed
toward the aisle as if a dog had vomited on her lap. “I don’t have to listen to
this,” she said. Outside, Ann Wright said she
had spent “29 years in the military and 16 years as a diplomat,” which
included helping reopen the U.S. consulate in Kabul after the Taliban was
ousted, before resigning over the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq. “For that asshole to say
that stuff is outrageous,” she fumed, drawing shushes from comrades amid a
growing cluster of orange in the corridor. Capitol Police rushed to quell the
disturbance. Back inside, Scheuer was
just getting warmed up. Delahunt, an experienced
prosecutor, was drawing Scheuer into a series of increasingly harsh
statements about critics of the rendition program. Scheuer obligingly denounced
Washington Post reporter Dana Priest for revealing ”information that damaged
U.S. national security and, as result, won a journalism prize for abetting
America’s enemies.” He called John McCain, R-Ariz., who helped craft last
year’s anti-torture legislation, “a perfect example of a man who is
terrifically courageous and has a lot of patriotism but not necessarily a
correlation with brainpower.” Not even John O’Neill, the
late, legendary FBI counterterrorism agent who died in the World Trade Center
inferno, escaped one of Scheuer’s shots. Delahunt reminded Scheuer
that the CIA man had once said O’Neill “was interested only in furthering his
career and disguising the rank incompetence of senior FBI leaders.” “Yes, sir,” said Scheuer,
peering back through light-reflecting glasses. “I think I also said that
the only good thing that happened to America on 11 September,” he said, “is
that the building fell on him, sir.” And with that, the room for
once fell silent. External link: http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002494626.html |