Former CIA Official Blasts Clinton, Press, Europeans, on Secret Prisons
Former CIA Official Blasts Clinton, Press, Europeans, on Secret Prisons
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Thursday, April 19, 2007
As European parliament members scolded their American hosts at a congressional hearing today on the CIA's "extraordinary terrorist rendition" program, former CIA official Michael Scheuer blasted European governments, the press, and the Clinton administration for "lies" about a counterterrorism program he says he personally authored in the mid-1990s.
Members of a European parliamentary special commission testified for the first time in Congress today about their 16-month investigation into CIA covert operations on European soil, and alleged that some 1,254 previously secret CIA flights may have been involved in conveying al-Qaida terror suspects to alleged "secret prisons" in Europe and elsewhere.
Several European governments have initiated legal proceedings against members of the CIA teams involved in the renditions. A court in Milan, Italy, has issued arrest warrants for 16 alleged CIA officers. All of the suspects except one, Robert Seldon Lady, who is now retired, were identified by pseudonyms in those court cases.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has jawboned several European diplomats over their handling of the rendition-related court cases, and informed them that "fewer than 100 people had been held in secret 'black site' facilities since the spring of 2002."
But Scheuer's no-holds-barred testimony provides for the first time an inside glimpse into what previously was one of the CIA's most closely-guarded secrets. The CIA renditions program was set up in the late summer of 1995, in order to "take men off the street who were planning or had been involved in attacks on the United States or its allies," Scheuer said. "I authored it, and then ran and managed it . . . until June 1999," he added.
Initially, the CIA never interrogated the terror suspects, but "rendered" them to their home countries where they were wanted for terror-related crimes.
The CIA "warned the president and the National Security Council that the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights abusers," Scheuer said.
"I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Berger, and Mr. Clarke have said since 9/11 that they insisted that each receiving country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S. legal standards. To the best of my memory, that is a lie," he said.
Samuel (Sandy) Berger was national security adviser and Richard Clarke was the counter-terrorism "czar" at the Clinton White House when Scheuer was running the program.
In previous statements, Scheuer has been critical of the Bush administration for mishandling the war on terror, in particular for the invasion of Iraq. But in today's testimony, he applauded Bush for expanding the rendition program to make it "even more effective."
Scheuer had harsh words for the European governments who have accused the CIA of "kidnapping" rendition targets, calling their accusations "either misstatements or lies by those governments."
"Indeed, it is passing strange that European leaders are here today to complain about very successful and security-enhancing U.S. government counterterrorism operations, when their European Union [EU] presides over the earth's single largest terrorist safe haven, and has done so for a quarter century."
Scheuer explained that he was talking about the EU's "policy of easily attainable political asylum" and its prohibition against deporting suspects to nations with the death penalty. These policies "have made Europe a major, consistent, and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United States," he said.
The former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden "station" revealed that each rendition required a written brief "vetted by a battery of lawyers at CIA" that explained why the target presented a threat to the United States or its allies. Some operations had been shelved, he said, if the lawyers felt the evidence was insufficiently solid.
"Let me be very explicit and precise on this point. Not one single al-Qaida leader has ever been rendered on the basis of any CIA officer's 'hunch' or 'guess' or 'caprice.' These are scurrilous accusations that became fashionable after the Washington Post's correspondent Dana Priest revealed information that damaged U.S. national security and, as result, won a journalism prize for abetting America's enemies," he said.
Scheuer also blasted Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Jay Rockefeller, D- W.Va.; Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.; and Carl Levin, D-Mich.; for "attack[ing] the men and women of CIA who risked their lives to protect America under the direct orders of two U.S. presidents and with the full knowledge of the intelligence committees of the United States Congress."
The senators fought successfully for legislation last year that imposed strict legal restraints on the ability of the CIA to interrogate terror suspects and specifically outlawed torture. Scheuer said that "both Ms. Priest" and the four senators "have behaved disgracefully, and ought to publicly apologize to the CIA's men and women who have executed the rendition program."
Scheuer also got in a dig at those who would shut down the program because "mistakes" have been made: "If mistakes were made, I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and confusing business, and a well-supported chance to take action and protect Americans should always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether or not the intelligence data is air tight."
In his sharpest blast of all, Scheuer warned that shutting down the program would "sacrifice the protection of Americans to venal and prize-hungry reporters like Ms. Priest, grandstanding politicians like those mentioned above, and effete sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them" while seeking to put CIA officers seeking to defend them in jail.
"If the rendition program is halted, we will truly be able to say, by paraphrasing the late film actor John Wayne, that war is tough, but it is a lot tougher if you are deliberately stupid."
http://tinyurl.com/2bparr
Bill Clinton's Clemency for Terrorists
Steve Malzberg
Thursday, July 12, 2007
"I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it." These are the words of presidential spokesman Tony Snow at last Thursday's daily press briefing.
What Snow is referring to is the criticism leveled at President Bush by both former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, over Bush's decision to commute the prison sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Snow couldn't have said it any better.
Bill Clinton weighed in on the commutation of Libby's prison sentence as if he has no history of controversy in these matters. "I think there are guidelines for what happens when somebody is convicted. You've got to understand, this is consistent with their philosophy; [the Bush administration] believes that they should be able to do what they want to, and that the law is a minor obstacle."
The blatant hypocrisy of the man who would once again share the White House is breathtaking. No, I'm not alluding to the fact that Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 over perjury allegations surrounding the Monica Lewinski affair. I'm not pointing to the fact that he pardoned 140 people on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office. That list included his half brother Roger, his former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and of course Marc Rich. No, I'm going back to what President Bill Clinton did in August of 1999.
Against the advice of his Justice Department and against the advice of the FBI, Clinton offered conditional clemency to 16 jailed members of the FALN. In the 1970s and early 1980s this Puerto Rican terrorist group set off more than 130 bombs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In January of 1975 they blew up Fraunces Tavern during lunchtime here in New York City. That blast killed four and injured 60 more.
Why let these thugs out of prison after we had seen the first World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, and the bombing of the USS Cole under Bill Clinton's watch? He said at the time that the 16 in question were not actually involved in killing anyone.
Yet they were all convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit robbery, bomb-making and sedition, as well as firearms and explosives violations. In fact a federal prosecutor was quoted back in November of 1999 as saying that the 16 FALN members were busted by the FBI while making bombs and planning to blow up military offices and rob a Chicago Transit Authority fare collector.
Clinton also defended his actions by noting that to accept clemency, each terrorist had to sign a form denouncing terrorism and violence.
Some feel that Bill Clinton did this to help his wife in her run for the U.S. Senate seat from New York the following year. It was supposed to get her the Hispanic vote, although I'm not sure how exactly.
The U.S. House and Senate were so enraged over what Clinton had done that they condemned the move, 311-41 in the House and by a 95-2 margin in the Senate. The final resolution said in part: ". . .Whereas the president's offer of clemency to the FALN terrorists violates longstanding tenets of U.S. counterterrorism policy and whereas the release of terrorists is an affront to the rule of law, the victims and their families and every American who believes that violent acts must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The making of concessions to terrorists is deplorable and President Clinton should not have granted clemency to the FALN terrorists."
Yes, Tony Snow is right on the money. It's pure Arkansas chutzpah.
Steve Malzberg is a radio talk-show host heard nightly on WOR Radio from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern Time in New York City and around the nation on the WOR Radio Network. You can hear him and e-mail him through www.wor710.com.
http://tinyurl.com/2bparr
THE CLINTON SCANDALS (Long List - MUST READ!):
NewsMax.com Hot Topics
Friday, Aug. 10, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/4qqm
Kenneth R. Timmerman
Thursday, April 19, 2007
As European parliament members scolded their American hosts at a congressional hearing today on the CIA's "extraordinary terrorist rendition" program, former CIA official Michael Scheuer blasted European governments, the press, and the Clinton administration for "lies" about a counterterrorism program he says he personally authored in the mid-1990s.
Members of a European parliamentary special commission testified for the first time in Congress today about their 16-month investigation into CIA covert operations on European soil, and alleged that some 1,254 previously secret CIA flights may have been involved in conveying al-Qaida terror suspects to alleged "secret prisons" in Europe and elsewhere.
Several European governments have initiated legal proceedings against members of the CIA teams involved in the renditions. A court in Milan, Italy, has issued arrest warrants for 16 alleged CIA officers. All of the suspects except one, Robert Seldon Lady, who is now retired, were identified by pseudonyms in those court cases.
The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that CIA Director Michael V. Hayden has jawboned several European diplomats over their handling of the rendition-related court cases, and informed them that "fewer than 100 people had been held in secret 'black site' facilities since the spring of 2002."
But Scheuer's no-holds-barred testimony provides for the first time an inside glimpse into what previously was one of the CIA's most closely-guarded secrets. The CIA renditions program was set up in the late summer of 1995, in order to "take men off the street who were planning or had been involved in attacks on the United States or its allies," Scheuer said. "I authored it, and then ran and managed it . . . until June 1999," he added.
Initially, the CIA never interrogated the terror suspects, but "rendered" them to their home countries where they were wanted for terror-related crimes.
The CIA "warned the president and the National Security Council that the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights abusers," Scheuer said.
"I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Berger, and Mr. Clarke have said since 9/11 that they insisted that each receiving country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S. legal standards. To the best of my memory, that is a lie," he said.
Samuel (Sandy) Berger was national security adviser and Richard Clarke was the counter-terrorism "czar" at the Clinton White House when Scheuer was running the program.
In previous statements, Scheuer has been critical of the Bush administration for mishandling the war on terror, in particular for the invasion of Iraq. But in today's testimony, he applauded Bush for expanding the rendition program to make it "even more effective."
Scheuer had harsh words for the European governments who have accused the CIA of "kidnapping" rendition targets, calling their accusations "either misstatements or lies by those governments."
"Indeed, it is passing strange that European leaders are here today to complain about very successful and security-enhancing U.S. government counterterrorism operations, when their European Union [EU] presides over the earth's single largest terrorist safe haven, and has done so for a quarter century."
Scheuer explained that he was talking about the EU's "policy of easily attainable political asylum" and its prohibition against deporting suspects to nations with the death penalty. These policies "have made Europe a major, consistent, and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United States," he said.
The former head of the CIA's Osama bin Laden "station" revealed that each rendition required a written brief "vetted by a battery of lawyers at CIA" that explained why the target presented a threat to the United States or its allies. Some operations had been shelved, he said, if the lawyers felt the evidence was insufficiently solid.
"Let me be very explicit and precise on this point. Not one single al-Qaida leader has ever been rendered on the basis of any CIA officer's 'hunch' or 'guess' or 'caprice.' These are scurrilous accusations that became fashionable after the Washington Post's correspondent Dana Priest revealed information that damaged U.S. national security and, as result, won a journalism prize for abetting America's enemies," he said.
Scheuer also blasted Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz.; Jay Rockefeller, D- W.Va.; Lindsay Graham, R-S.C.; and Carl Levin, D-Mich.; for "attack[ing] the men and women of CIA who risked their lives to protect America under the direct orders of two U.S. presidents and with the full knowledge of the intelligence committees of the United States Congress."
The senators fought successfully for legislation last year that imposed strict legal restraints on the ability of the CIA to interrogate terror suspects and specifically outlawed torture. Scheuer said that "both Ms. Priest" and the four senators "have behaved disgracefully, and ought to publicly apologize to the CIA's men and women who have executed the rendition program."
Scheuer also got in a dig at those who would shut down the program because "mistakes" have been made: "If mistakes were made, I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and confusing business, and a well-supported chance to take action and protect Americans should always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether or not the intelligence data is air tight."
In his sharpest blast of all, Scheuer warned that shutting down the program would "sacrifice the protection of Americans to venal and prize-hungry reporters like Ms. Priest, grandstanding politicians like those mentioned above, and effete sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them" while seeking to put CIA officers seeking to defend them in jail.
"If the rendition program is halted, we will truly be able to say, by paraphrasing the late film actor John Wayne, that war is tough, but it is a lot tougher if you are deliberately stupid."
http://tinyurl.com/2bparr
Bill Clinton's Clemency for Terrorists
Steve Malzberg
Thursday, July 12, 2007
"I don't know what Arkansan is for chutzpah, but this is a gigantic case of it." These are the words of presidential spokesman Tony Snow at last Thursday's daily press briefing.
What Snow is referring to is the criticism leveled at President Bush by both former President Bill Clinton and his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, over Bush's decision to commute the prison sentence of former White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Snow couldn't have said it any better.
Bill Clinton weighed in on the commutation of Libby's prison sentence as if he has no history of controversy in these matters. "I think there are guidelines for what happens when somebody is convicted. You've got to understand, this is consistent with their philosophy; [the Bush administration] believes that they should be able to do what they want to, and that the law is a minor obstacle."
The blatant hypocrisy of the man who would once again share the White House is breathtaking. No, I'm not alluding to the fact that Bill Clinton was impeached in 1998 over perjury allegations surrounding the Monica Lewinski affair. I'm not pointing to the fact that he pardoned 140 people on Jan. 20, 2001, his last day in office. That list included his half brother Roger, his former HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros and of course Marc Rich. No, I'm going back to what President Bill Clinton did in August of 1999.
Against the advice of his Justice Department and against the advice of the FBI, Clinton offered conditional clemency to 16 jailed members of the FALN. In the 1970s and early 1980s this Puerto Rican terrorist group set off more than 130 bombs in the U.S. and Puerto Rico. In January of 1975 they blew up Fraunces Tavern during lunchtime here in New York City. That blast killed four and injured 60 more.
Why let these thugs out of prison after we had seen the first World Trade Center bombing, the U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa, and the bombing of the USS Cole under Bill Clinton's watch? He said at the time that the 16 in question were not actually involved in killing anyone.
Yet they were all convicted on charges of conspiracy to commit robbery, bomb-making and sedition, as well as firearms and explosives violations. In fact a federal prosecutor was quoted back in November of 1999 as saying that the 16 FALN members were busted by the FBI while making bombs and planning to blow up military offices and rob a Chicago Transit Authority fare collector.
Clinton also defended his actions by noting that to accept clemency, each terrorist had to sign a form denouncing terrorism and violence.
Some feel that Bill Clinton did this to help his wife in her run for the U.S. Senate seat from New York the following year. It was supposed to get her the Hispanic vote, although I'm not sure how exactly.
The U.S. House and Senate were so enraged over what Clinton had done that they condemned the move, 311-41 in the House and by a 95-2 margin in the Senate. The final resolution said in part: ". . .Whereas the president's offer of clemency to the FALN terrorists violates longstanding tenets of U.S. counterterrorism policy and whereas the release of terrorists is an affront to the rule of law, the victims and their families and every American who believes that violent acts must be punished to the fullest extent of the law. The making of concessions to terrorists is deplorable and President Clinton should not have granted clemency to the FALN terrorists."
Yes, Tony Snow is right on the money. It's pure Arkansas chutzpah.
Steve Malzberg is a radio talk-show host heard nightly on WOR Radio from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. Eastern Time in New York City and around the nation on the WOR Radio Network. You can hear him and e-mail him through www.wor710.com.
http://tinyurl.com/2bparr
THE CLINTON SCANDALS (Long List - MUST READ!):
NewsMax.com Hot Topics
Friday, Aug. 10, 2007
http://tinyurl.com/4qqm
bin66 - 10. Aug, 00:34
