MUST READ- French article on US TORTURE with interviews of ex-CIA agents

Nothing Without Hope

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Fri Apr-22-05 11:42 PM
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MUST READ- French article on US TORTURE with interviews of ex-CIA agents

An amazing – but is it surprising? – article on the routine running of torture around the world as a “legal” activity by the CIA. This long article is from the French publication La Monde Diplomatique and cites interviews of former CIA officers among other sources. Except from Seymour Hersh, you don’t’ see much on this subject in the US media. You will get only a taste of the article from the four paragraphs I excerpt below - I recommend reading the entire article.

I found this article and many other fascinating foreign articles on US matters from around the world at a remarkable site which I recommend enthusiastically, Watching America: http://www.watchingamerica.com

http://mondediplo.com/2005/04/04usatorture
La Monde Diplomatique, April 5

United States: trade in torture

This is a story of private jets flying out of Germany, of kidnappings on European streets, and of torture. It has a cast of lawyers, spies, suspected terrorists, innocent bystanders and an ex-CIA boss who believes that ‘human rights is a very flexible concept’.
By Stephen Grey

(snip)

According to a former covert officer with the CIA, Robert Baer, who has seen the flight logs, the jet is definitely involved in renditions. “The ultimate destinations of these flights are places that are involved in torture,” he says. Baer, who worked for the CIA in the Middle East for 21 years until he left in the mid-1990s, said such civilian jets were useful to the CIA because there were no military markings. “You can run these things out of shelf companies. You can set them up quickly, dismantle them when they are exposed; you can do it overnight - change the airplane if you have to. It’s fairly standard practice.”

Baer says rendition is about more than sending terrorists to be locked up in prison. Each country has its own value. “If you send a prisoner to Jordan you get a better interrogation. If you send a prisoner to Egypt you will probably never see him again; the same with Syria.” Countries such as Syria might seem to be US enemies but remain allies in the secret war against Islamic militancy. Baer says: “The simple rule in the Middle East is my enemy’s enemy is my friend . . . that’s the way it works. All of these countries are suffering in one way or another from Islamic fundamentalism, militant Islam.” For years the Syrians have offered to work with the US against Islamic militancy. “So at least until 11 September these offers were turned down. We generally avoided the Egyptians and the Syrians because they were so brutal.”

Baer believes the CIA has been carrying out renditions for years, but they became bigger and more systematic after 9/11. He says hundreds of prisoners, more than were sent to Guantánamo, may have been sent by the US to Middle Eastern prisons and that 9/11 had “justified scrapping the Geneva Convention” and was the end of “our rule of law as we knew it in the West”.

(snip)

Scheuer {Michael Scheuer, who in the late 1990s headed the unit tasked with hunting down Osama bin Laden, was interviewed for a BBC Radio program, File on Four} insists that every rendition operation was approved by lawyers: “There is a large legal department within the CIA, and there is a section of the department of justice that is involved in legal interpretations for intelligence work, and there is a team of lawyers at the national security council. And on all of these things those lawyers are involved in one way or another and have signed off on the procedure. The idea that somehow this is a rogue operation that someone has dreamed up is just absurd.” Scheuer recalls that when he organised such operations, the authority had to come from director of central intelligence or his assistant director. “So basically the number one and two men in the intelligence community are the ones who sign off.”

(snip)