Renditions usually since 1995

US intellingence expert Michael Scheuer gave an interview in "Die Zeit". I've done a short translation.

http://www.zeit.de/2006/01/M__Scheuer?page=all


The CIA has the right to breake every law.

Michael Scheuer quits his job at the CIA in Nov 2004 after 22 years of service. From 1995 to 1999 he runs the division that search for OBL.
Since 2000 he was one of the chief antiterrorist officers in the CIA. While he was at service he wrote a critical book already, called "Imperial Hubris". Michael Scheuer was seen as a runner-down of one's own country from the CIA. He lives with his family in Virginia.

Q: You co-developed the system of »renditions«. Terror suspects were caught abroad and delivered to other countries. Were those renditions a success in view of the CIA?

Michael Scheuer: Absolutely. It was the most successful US anti terror fight method for a decade.


Q: Who had invented this system?

Scheuer: President Clinton, his security council Sandy Berger and terror adviser Richard Clarke charged the CIA in autumn 1995 to destroy al-Qaida. We asked the president: What should we do with people that we'll arrest?
And Clinton answered: It's your case. The CIA sayed: We were not gaolers. But they told us again that we should solve this problem somehow. Therefore we built a procedure, and I became a member of this working staff. We concentrated on Al-Qaida-members, who were looked for in their home countries or who were comdemned in absence.

*snip

Q: The human rights didn't play a role in the Clinton admin?

Scheuer: The CIA posed these questions. The people in Cairo were treated different to Milwaukee. The Clinton admin asked us: Do you believe that the prisoners were treated under the guidelines of law of these countries?. And we answered: Yes, we are quite sure.

Q: The Clinton admin didn't want to know exactly what did happen there?

Scheuer: Precise. The concerned CIA employees were sure from the beginning, that we'll be seen guilty at the end. And maybe you'll notice: In this debate is no word to hear from Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger or Richard Clarke.

Q: Which laws were broken?

Scheuer: I really don't know.
Anyway no americans. The CIA has the right to break every law, except american law- like every intelligence agency. Abroad we act only with approbation from local authorities.


***

Yeah. For sure. :D


Excuse my eventually translation errors.
My english still isn't the best.
So why I have make work? Not for those who'll blame Clinton on every faulty step of the Bush-regime.
But for another strong hint that the CIA was very close to al-Quaida since 1995 at last.

And that renditions were quite normally even under Clinton admin. And the BushCos told us they have no idea in advance what did happen on 9-11.

So what exactly did the CIA with the insights of a decade of renditions?


Only one logical answer: They built patsies...

Any ideas?

I have never had any illusions about the Clinton Administration. The great majority in this Country have no idea of the monster that is US foreign policy. This Country is run by and for the corporations and has been for many decades.

Our Government has ignored the will of the People for so long, with so little consequence, that they have become increasingly arrogant. We hope to effect meaningful change soon.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20051228/pl_afp/usattacksciaclinton_051228161155

I think that's a lot of BS coming out of Scheuer anyway. If the method was so successfull why didn't it prevent the growth of Al Quaeda, 9/11 etc... What I know of, the US became really aware of the flaws in their system after 9/11 and turned to classic European agencies to obtain the RELIABLE information, not the contrary.

Sounds to me that the purpose of the interview is to put the blame on Clinton, more than have a real evaluation of the flaws in the CIA activities...

belongs on Clinton. Daddy Bush may have dreamed up the policy, but Clinton is the one who OKed putting it into practice.

Great, now I have another reason to dislike Clinton, just what I needed.

looks like I waste some time with the translation.

***

If the method was so successfull why didn't it prevent the growth of Al Quaeda, 9/11 etc...

This is a very good question, I tend to know the answer, as stated above. They don't want to stop them.

Sounds to me that the purpose of the interview is to put the blame on Clinton, more than have a real evaluation of the flaws in the CIA activities...

I agree, but sometimes such defense tactic doesn't work well, as you can see. Sometimes things came up to the air that never supposed to be. You have to search for them between the lines.

Every thinking men will ask the same question as you.

ed on sp

had Clinton tight control, and now we have Bush no control

So today the Bush folks planted in the German press this gem, picked up by a "blog" on the internet:
http://www.politicalgateway.com/news/read.html?id=5717
Bob Hoffman 954-946-1500
CIA prisoner 'rendition' program began under Clinton: ex-agent
<snip>Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system. "President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.
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WHICH IGNORED THE RW WEEKLYSTANDARD COMMENT THAT PRACTICE HAS REAGAN "ANTECEDENTS"
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/0...

Though the Central Intelligence Agency doesn't comment officially on the policy, it is one the Bush administration inherited from its predecessor, which used it principally against Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda. According to a former CIA officer knowledgeable about rendition in the 1990s, the Clinton administration first briefed the congressional intelligence oversight committees on transfers in the summer of 1995. Even then, the practice had antecedents in the cooperative "liaison" intelligence efforts Langley has run with a variety of Middle Eastern and Asian countries, notably Egypt and Jordan, the two Arab states with which the Clandestine Service has probably worked most closely over the last 25 years. In the mid-1980s, when Duane Clarridge, the contra-supporting, covert-action-loving favorite of CIA director William Casey, transformed the agency's Counterterrorism Center into a serious bureaucratic force at Langley, counterterrorist liaison work with friendly Arab states increased significantly. Joint-counterterrorist and joint-espionage operations have occasionally cast foreign security services as punishers of deceitful agents controlled by CIA case officers. Depending on the sin, retribution could be severe.
=========================================================


AND WHICH IGNORED THE NYT POINTING OUT CLINTON RENDITION HAD GREATER OVERSIGHT AND TIGHTER RESTRICTIONS - USING THE PRACTICE TO MOSTLY SEND FOLKS TO COUNTRIES WHERE THEY WOULD BE TRIED UNDER THE LAW OF THAT COUNTRY FOR A KNOWN CRIME.

The New York Times reported on March 6 that the Clinton administration enforced much greater oversight and tighter restrictions on renditions and generally used the practice to send suspects to a country where they would face criminal prosecutions, rather than solely to undergo interrogation, as the Bush administration has reportedly authorized.
http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/...

==========================================================================

YET 60 MINUTES/FOX TOLD THIS STORY FROM BUSH POINT OF VIEW 6 MONTHS AGO


http://mediamatters.org/items/200503090003

government officials say, the C.I.A. has been authorized to transfer prisoners to other countries solely for the purpose of detention and interrogation.

Similarly, Jane Mayer reported in the February 14 edition of The New Yorker that the limited rendition program under President Clinton expanded after 9-11 "beyond recognition": http://mediamatters.org/rd?http://www.newyorker.com/fac...

Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition -- becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, "an abomination." What began as a program aimed at a small, discrete set of suspects -- people against whom there were outstanding foreign arrest warrants -- came to include a wide and ill-defined population that the Administration terms "illegal enemy combatants."

On the March 6 broadcast of CBS' 60 Minutes, Pelley failed to note the distinction between the rendition policies of the Clinton and Bush administrations:<snip>
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SO WHY IS MEDIA RETELLING THE BUSH/FOX PARTIAL TRUTH LIES -OR WILL MAIN STREAM MEDIA CORRECTLY REPORT THE HISTORY OF RENDITION THIS TIME?

Here is my understanding, as best as I can piece one together from all the cites:

1) Suspects located or captured by CIA were sent to countries where known crimes had been committed.

2) Where practicable, the capture and enforcement activities were performed by the countries themselves.

3) "Due process" prior to rendition was not an issue because the suspects were never in the custody of the United States. (I suspect that this might be a convenient fiction in circumstances where the CIA made the capture.)


Anything that I should change or add?

date back to the type of actions taken under Reagan and Clinton.

"extraordinary rendition" is the Bush special process where suspects are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party state, often without ever being on American soil. Because such cases do not involve the rendering country's judiciary, they have been termed extraordinary rendition.

International rendition
Since the 1980s, the United States has increasingly turned to rendition as a judicial and extra-judicial method for dealing with foreign defendants. The first well-known case involved the Achille Lauro hijackers, who were in an airplane over international waters that was forced down by United States Air Force fighter planes in an attempt to turn them over to United States Government representatives for transport to and trial in the United States. Later, the practice expanded to include the deportation and expulsion of persons deemed enemy aliens or terrorists from countries into United States custody.

The CIA was granted permission to use rendition in a presidential directive that dates to the Clinton administration, although very few uses were documented during that time. The practice has grown sharply since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and now includes a form where suspects are taken into US custody but delivered to a third-party state, often without ever being on American soil. Because such cases do not involve the rendering country's judiciary, they have been termed extraordinary rendition.

Human rights groups charge that extraordinary rendition is a violation of the United Nations Convention on Torture, because suspects are taken to countries where torture during interrogation remains legal, thus circumventing the protections the captives would enjoy in the United States or other nations in the West. Its legality remains highly controversial, as the United States outlaws the use of torture, and the U.S. Constitution guarantees due process. Rendered suspects are denied due process because they are arrested without charges and deprived of legal counsel.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rendition


Scheuer mixes up the two forms of rendition. The first one can be seen as acceptable under certain conditions, the second one is an old nazi method, and has nothing to do with the "clintonesque" version. Scheuer with his "22 years of experience" cannot be unaware of that, unless he is out to smear.

:-(

since the 80's, I dare say since the beginning of it's existence which helped create the "cold war".

It's amazing how it is that the entire evil history of the CIA is so not understood in this country - it's not as though there haven't been a gazillion books and historical publications recording on the subject and available in library's and bookstores.

Yes, some of these policies were not not known even within the entire agency as every single operation would managed in a compartmentalized in structure and kept secret from others.

By the way, something else the Corporate Media isn't mentioning, it was reported in the various newspapers this past year or may have been 2004, that there have been coordinated mass arrests in one fell swoop, something like ten to twenty thousand people in this country - arrested all at once. they said in the press that these were all fugitives from justice - felons, murderers, child molesters and rapists and such, no follow up reports about who these people were, which communities they resided in, and what became of these so called fugitives. Well I think that's sort of weird.. but no body talked about it at the time.

We have bad stuff going on in this country for a long time under every adminstration.