Expert: Rendition vital but overused
, Staff WriterDURHAM - The man who started the controversial Central Intelligence Agency program that snatches terrorism suspects from one country and flies them to another for interrogation referred to it Friday as "the single most effective counterterrorism program in American history."
It should have a lesser role, though, and would be unnecessary if the United States were not improperly trying to force democracy on other countries, said Michael Scheuer, who worked for the CIA for 22 years, nearly all of them in covert operations.
Scheuer was speaking at a Duke University conference on how the next presidential administration might handle some of the more difficult aspects of fighting terrorism. He was on a panel about the CIA program, which is called "extraordinary rendition."
When the practice became public, it triggered outrage and protests around the world and legal action against CIA workers in Europe, where some of the suspects were captured. Opponents think that many of the countries where suspects are taken torture them.
Some of the protests have taken place at the Johnston County airport used by Aero Contractors Ltd., a company widely thought to be a front for CIA aircraft operations. A German court indicted several members of the company's air crews last year in connection with a rendition.
It's often overlooked, Scheuer said, that the practice began not with President George W. Bush but under his predecessor, Bill Clinton. Claims by Clinton administration officials that prisoners were sent only to countries that agreed to treat them according to U.S. laws weren't true, he said, adding that it's hard to imagine a country that would agree to such restrictions.
Scheuer ran the rendition program from its start in July 1995 to June 1999, he said.
Under Clinton, the program was different, he said. For one thing, there was little interest in information gleaned from interrogations.
CIA officials thought the country doing the questioning would alter the information to deceive the United States. Also, it had become clear that al-Qaida operatives had been trained to give either bad information or huge volumes of facts that were accurate but so dated that the United States would waste time investigating them.
So instead of interrogations, the CIA tried to get documents in either tape or digital form that the operatives might be carrying with them, Scheuer said.
Under Bush, he said, the emphasis changed to interrogations and having the CIA perform them.
The program is still vital, he said, but was never intended to be such a central source for crucial intelligence about terrorism. It was meant to complement other efforts, such as the work of special operations units and diplomacy.
Others on the Duke panel said that rendition may be effective in the short term but that any rational evaluation of it would require considering long-term effects that may be hard to quantify -- such as the erosion it causes to the reputation of the United States abroad.
The program should be shut down, said Aziz Huq, an expert on detention cases involving national security who is with New York University Law School. Huq said it is corrosive to democratic government in places such as Egypt and Pakistan, where proper governments are crucial in long-term efforts to fight terrorism.
There need to be more congressional oversight and more internal controls, such as an ombudsman, said former CIA lawyer and former federal prosecutor John Radson,[sic. why?? Its' RADSAN] now an associate professor at William Mitchell College of Law in St. Paul, Minn. These controls should be made public, even if details about the program aren't.
"We should let the world know that we are going to not be doing this willy-nilly, but that the program is important," Radson [sic] said. "When you have 100, 150 people who have been rendered, you can't just say we're going to have a mistake or two."
and torture.
How friggin handy for them ..
Here is an important video with Radsan to watch:
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