A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions

[babylonsister]

http://public.cq.com/docs/hs/hsnews110-000002494626.html

A CIA Man Speaks His Mind on Secret Abductions
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

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

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[sam sarrha]

1. i bet the people they hauled off to Uzbekistan to be boiled alive are F'n sorry too..!!