DID YOU KNOW RENDITION STARTED UNDER CLINTON?

"Captain's Quarter's" reports on something that actually has been quite public but simply not mentioned by the MSM.

Former CIA operative and now-author Michael Scheuer, who wrote a lengthy criticism of the Bush administration's war policy in 2003 in part for not being aggressive enough, has revealed that the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" policy began in 1995 under President Clinton:

'The CIA's controversial "rendition" program to have terror suspects captured and questioned on foreign soil was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a former US counterterrorism agent told a German newspaper. Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the newsweekly Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system.

"President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda," Scheuer said, in comments published in German.

"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."

Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the "renditions" program, which he said included moving prisoners without due legal process to countries without strict human rights protections...'

Instead, the Bush administration decided not to render CIA captives after 9/11 but to have the agency keep custody of the terrorists in foreign bases, such as Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and apparently some of the European nations that the Washington Post exposed in its leak publication. In point of fact, the Bush administration took more responsibility and offered a plan that resulted in lowered likelihoods of torture by foreign governments of American prisoners.

And a blog that is providing translation of the Scheuer interview.

In fact extraordinary rendition is described (in one place I am sure of many) in Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, by Stephen Coll, The Penguin Press, 2004, pp. 377-378.

Also see Clarke's Against All Enemies, Free Press, 2004, pp. 150-153.

Incidentally, the case of Maher Arar was not one of rendition; it was a simple, legal deportation--though with similar results to renditions under Clinton.

Posted by markc at January 1, 2006 09:49 PM | TrackBack