"I'm perfectly happy to do anything to defend the USA-so long as the lawyers sign off on it"

[kpete]

'Extraordinary-rendition' procedure unreliable, says CIA vet who created it
COLIN FREEZE

From Monday's Globe and Mail

April 14, 2008 at 4:27 AM EDT


An estimated 100 to 150 people have been rendered to foreign prisons by the U.S. program, of which Mr. Scheuer remains a big booster. Now retired, he created the program when he was a Central Intelligence Agency analyst tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden. He said the program has been enormously valuable, at least in terms of taking high-level terrorists off the streets and seeing what documents they carried.

But he added that resulting interrogations proved dubious once suspects were sent to third-country prisons, such as Syria or Egypt. "You could bet on the testimony given to you, it was altered in a way that would serve the interests of the country that was giving it," he said. "So, it was very tainted, in the sense that if Country X or Country Y interrogated these people, you would really have some information, but it would be far from coupled with what was actually being said."

Mr. Scheuer didn't dispute that torture has occurred in foreign jails where the United States sent suspects - "You'd have to assume that 80 per cent (of prisoners rendered to Egypt are not going to have a good time," he said - but said simply that he didn't particularly care. "I'm perfectly happy to do anything to defend the United States, so long as the lawyers sign off on it," he said.

....................

Speaking at Duke, Mr. Scheuer did put some distance between the program he hatched in 1995 and events that occurred after 2001. "The bar was lowered after 9/11," he said.

[Solly Mack]

1. Amazing

K&R

[Supersedeas]

2. meanwhile the US Media Establishment is stuck on poll numbers and the weather

[Breeze54]

3. Big talk for such a low life.... now retired!!

:grr:

"Now retired, he created the program ('Extraordinary-rendition') when he was a Central Intelligence Agency analyst"

[Supersedeas]

5. the truth....developing....courage comes even later

[moodforaday]

4. Michael Scheuer?

The author of "Imperial Hubris" and "Through Our Enemies' Eyes", the book on OBL? The one whose Wikipedia entry has the following nugget?


Scheuer participated in the following exchange on the FOX News program The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: I'm bringing it up to be - to show the Islamic world and those Muslims who are watching us right now, the inconsistency of their thought that, if there was a - you know, a God that was actually wanting them to do whatever, how could he possibly want them to...
SCHEUER: No, I don't quite follow it, sir, because I -- as much as I'd like to believe that human life is sacred in all instances, war, whether it's conducted by Americans or by British or by Chinese or by Muslims, war is just war. And it kills innocent people. And that's the way it is.
O'REILLY: But there's a way to wage it. And the way that the al Qaedas are waging it is by killing civilians. They're not waging war in a conventional way, as you know. Now...
SCHEUER: Well, they are waging war in the conventional way that we waged war until 1945, sir, which is the last war we've won. Once we stopped waging war in the American fashion, we haven't won a war since....
O'REILLY: Is there anything we can do to win it?
SCHEUER: Yes, sir. We certainly have to kill more of the enemy. That's the first step.
O'REILLY: Any way we can?
SCHEUER: Anywhere we can, whenever we can, without a great deal of concern for civilian casualties. As I said, war is war. The people who got killed when they were hosting Zawahiri to dinner were not the friends of the United States.
O'REILLY: All right, Mr Scheuer, always a pleasure to talk with you.

From The O'Reilly Factor, 19 January 2006

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


I am not surprised.