|
These two men are experts on rendition: one
invented it, the other has seen its full horrors
By Neil Mackay
10/16/05 "Sunday
Herald " -- -- If there are two men in the
world who know about “extraordinary renditions” then they are
Michael Scheuer, the CIA chief who invented the programme, and
Craig Murray, the UK ambassador to Uzbekistan who saw first-hand
the devastating consequences for British intelligence of using
renditions.
In exclusive interviews with the Sunday Herald they blew apart
any justification for the rendition system, saying the US
government deliberately refused to opt for a legal alternative
to renditions which was presented to the President by the CIA
and that the programme undermined Western democracy, damaged the
prosecution of the war on terror and “contaminated British and
US intelligence”.
Michael Scheuer
CIA officer and special adviser to the chief of the CIA’s bin
Laden department until November 2004
In 1995, in the wake of the 1993 car-bomb attack on the World
Trade Centre in New York, Scheuer was the main CIA officer
charged with hunting down Islamic terrorists believed to be
posing a threat to the US. He was the “go-to guy” for all things
al-Qaeda.
President Clinton’s National Security Council had asked the CIA
to break up al-Qaeda around the world and to arrest and imprison
key operatives. “The Agency is a tool of the President so of
course we said “yes”,” Scheuer explains at his home near the
CIA’s HQ in Langley, Virginia. “We asked how we were to do it
and where we were to take them, and they said “it’s up to you”.”
The CIA has no prisons and no powers of arrest, so Scheuer was
presented with something of a problem. The programme of
renditions he developed was very different to the system which
now operates.
Today, anyone suspected of links to terrorism can be snatched
anywhere in the world, put on a secret CIA jet and taken to a
country, such as Egypt, for “out-sourced” torture.
When Scheuer developed his programme he stipulated strictly that
only suspects who had been tried in absentia for terrorist
offences or had an outstanding arrest warrant were to be
targeted. “They had to be part of some legal process,” Scheuer
says. “We were focusing on a very narrow segment of al-Qaeda. It
was very delicate and complicated.”
The target also had to be perceived as a direct threat to the US
by the CIA and the department of justice and the country in
which the person was to be seized had to support the action and
carry out the arrest. Today there only has to be the suggestion
they are involved in terrorism – no convictions or warrants are
needed, nor is the permission of another country.
Even more crucially, Scheuer’s rendition programme stated that
snatched suspects would be taken to the US as prisoners of war,
protected by the Geneva Conventions. The Clinton administration,
however, says Scheuer, forbade this, insisting instead on
sending captives to whatever nation had tried them or had an
outstanding warrant for them. “To give them PoW status would
have given them credibility, in the eyes of the administration,
and they didn’t want that,” Scheuer says.
Scheuer was in charge of the snatch operations from 1995, when
the first target was seized, until June 1999. In that time, some
50 were captured. Since 9/11 there have been 150 to 200
snatches. “The primary intention was to get the guy off the
streets so he couldn’t carry out any more atrocities against US
citizens,” he says.
“Our second goal was to seize documents along with the suspect
and exploit them for intelligence. Finally, we never expected to
get anything from interrogations. Al-Qaeda are trained to fight
the jihad from their jail cells , they are masters of
counter-interrogation. They’ll give you old information or false
information. The CIA never felt it would help to torture these
people. ”
Scheuer remains disappointed that his plan to bring suspects
back to the US was rejected. “I said we should take them back to
America as prisoners of war under the Geneva Conventions, where
we could have done so much more with them,” he adds. “Osama bin
Laden had declared war on us, so we should have put them in PoW
camps and let the Red Cross deal with them.
“If we had brought them to the US, the rendition programme would
be being celebrated around the world today. We would have abided
by the Geneva Conventions. It would have gone down in CIA lore
as a tremendous operation if it was handled in a way
commensurate with US law.
“The fact that it isn’t, is down to the policymakers. It’s
better to use a system that’s in place – of PoWs and the Geneva
Conventions – than invent a new one ad-hoc which people don’t
agree with. We shot ourselves in both feet. We did it in such a
stupid way.
“Everyone from the President down had the option to make them
PoWs, but they were arrogant. We believe al-Qaeda can get
legitimacy from what we say and do, so there was a constant fear
of giving them legitimacy by calling them PoWs.”
Scheuer accepts that targets were tortured both before and after
9/11. “I have no doubt about it,” he says. “You’d think I’m an
ass if I said nobody was tortured. There was more of a
willingness in the White House to turn a blind eye to the legal
niceties than within the CIA. The Agency always knew it would be
left holding the baby for this one.”
But does he care if people suffered? “My priority was to protect
Americans. Of course, I would have been much more comfortable if
these people had been taken to America. I try to be a good
Christian, and I don’t want to see anyone treated badly, but I’m
paid to protect Americans, so if the lawyers said it was okay,
it was okay. The guys were bad guys .”
Craig Murray
British ambassador to Uzbekistan until October 2004
UZBEKISTAN is one of the destinations where “rendered” prisoners
end up after being kidnapped by the CIA . Uzbekistan is also
somewhere where prisoners are literally boiled alive in
cauldrons in the Tashkent torture chambers of the SNB, the Uzbek
secret police. Every type of torture the mind can imagine
happens in the Central Asian dictatorship.
Craig Murray’s experience is central to understanding the impact
that “extraordinary renditions” have on the British intelligence
services, the British government and the British people. When a
rendered suspect is tortured in Uzbekistan, for example, the SNB
forward the confession to the CIA. The CIA then forward the
confession to MI6. MI6 pass the information to Cabinet
ministers, who use it to make pronouncements about security
threats to the UK. The routine is followed no matter in which
country the rendered suspect is tortured.
Statements extracted under torture are totally unreliable,
sometimes concocted by the interrogators themselves, the victim
merely signing them. At other times, Western intelligence
services will ask their counterparts in Tashkent or Cairo to
question the suspect specifically about people in the UK or the
US . Inevitably, the victim admits whatever he is asked to
admit. A lie enters the stream of intelligence as the truth.
When asked if this was how people were targeted for arrest in
the UK and how claims came to be made about terror plots that
never materialised, Murray agreed unequivocally.
“In Uzbekistan, it works like this,” he says. “Person X is
tortured and signs a statement saying he’s going to crash planes
into buildings, or that he’s linked to Osama bin Laden. He’s
also asked if he knows persons X, Y and Z in the UK who are
involved in terrorism. He’ll be tortured until he agrees, though
he’s never met them.”
The confession is sent to the CIA where, according to Murray, it
is “sanitised”. Before sanitisation the report “will have the
guy’s name on it, the date of the interrogation, where it took
place – and might still be bloodstained.
“The CIA then issues a debriefing document, which does not name
the individual. It does not say he was tortured. It only says
that it is a detainee debriefing from a friendly overseas
security service.
“This will set out the brief facts, such as “we now know person
X in London is in Islamic Jihad and plans to blow up Canary
Wharf”. This goes to MI6 – the British and Americans share
everything – and then it goes to MI6’s customers: the Prime
Minister, the defence secretary, the home secretary, the foreign
secretary, and other key ministers and officials. I was one of
these customers too because I was the ambassador to Tashkent.
“I’d look at these reports and, to be frank, I realised they
were bollocks. One talked about terror camps in the hills near
Samarkand. I knew the precise location being talked about and it
wasn’t true.
“The threats of Islamic extremism in Uzbekistan were
exaggerated. I knew the picture on the ground, and claims that
there was a large Islamic grouping linked to al-Qaeda were
false. The Uzbeks wanted to convince the US they were suffering
the same terrorist problem. So if America supported them, they
would help in the war on terror.
“What terrifies me is that our government is saying we need to
lock up various people on the basis of intelligence that can’t
be used in court. But we know the material is dodgy. It is not
evidence. It is very important that we realise we are
contaminating the pool of intelligence. It leads to false
threats, public hysteria and the diversion of resources from
real threats.”
As an insider, Murray quickly came to understand that “just
because a fact is false doesn’t mean it isn’t useful”. He adds:
“Look at the intelligence on WMD. It was false, but it existed
on paper and it was still useful for the government in starting
a war. In deciding the importance of intelligence it isn’t
really important if it is true or not.”
There is no question in Murray’s mind that the British
government knew that intelligence reports they were receiving
were the results of torture. “I sent telegrams to them saying
that torture was going on,” he says. “They know, but they are
deliberately blind to it. I warned ministers it was illegal. But
the politicians were very keen to just keep going ahead. ”
Even more sinister is the complicity of British intelligence in
concocting false confessions . “The MI6 head of station in
Uzbekistan would meet his counterpart in the host security
service regularly. They would go over who was in detention and
what questions could be put to them. They were seeking the false
information they wanted,” he says.
“We are eroding intelligence and democracy. In Uzbekistan,
thousands of people are tortured every year. If we collude in
it, is it any wonder Muslims hate us?”
Copyright Sunday Herald Ltd
Translate
this page
(In accordance with Title 17
U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to
those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational purposes.
Information Clearing House has no affiliation whatsoever with the
originator of this article nor is Information Clearing House
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.) |
