From the 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.
