Rendition, the CIA, and Islamist Cannon-Fodder

The airplanes of Aero Contractors Ltd. take off from Johnston County Airport here, then disappear over the scrub pines and fields of tobacco and sweet potatoes. Nothing about the sleepy Southern setting hints of foreign intrigue. Nothing gives away the fact that Aero’s pilots are the discreet bus drivers of the battle against terrorism, routinely sent on secret missions to Baghdad, Cairo, Tashkent and Kabul.

When the Central Intelligence Agency wants to grab a suspected member of Al Qaeda overseas and deliver him to interrogators in another country, an Aero Contractors plane often does the job.
NYT: Free Reg

The former UK ambassador to Tashkent, Craig Murray, said: “People come to me very often after being tortured. Normally this includes homosexual and heterosexual rape of close relatives in front of the victim; rape with objects such as broken bottles; and use of boiling liquids including complete immersion of the body.”
Guardian

Rendition also solves the problem of how to deal with minor-league would-be Islamic terrorists or guerrillas who may or may not have had the United States in their sights. These are individuals who are guilty by association with al Qaeda and its allied groups but would never, ever be prosecuted in an American civilian or military court for lack of legally admissible evidence.

The large-scale renditions to Uzbekistan that the New York Times has reported on were probably mostly of this petty, Guantanamo-avoidance type. Central Asian Islamic extremists picked up in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban have probably not yet fully embraced the overriding America-focused hatred of al Qaeda (though with continued U.S. backing of Uzbek president-for-life Islam Karimov, this might change).

Culturally and linguistically, these al Qaeda-allied militants have limited operational range; they are what Ahmed Shah Massoud, the murdered leader of the Afghan Northern Alliance, once called “Islamist cannon-fodder” for the Taliban. Whatever information the Uzbek security service could beat out of these men would be considered a tangential benefit to the CIA–while removing them from its hands, or the hands of the U.S.-backed government in Kabul, would be a blessing. Transfers of such detainees further cement the 14 years of pretty warm relations between Langley and Tashkent’s security and intelligence services–easily, according to active-duty CIA officers, the best liaison cooperation the agency has enjoyed with any Central Asian state since the crack-up of the Soviet Union.(emphasis mine)

Officials say publicly that they do not render suspects to countries where they will be tortured.

“We have an obligation not to render people to countries if we believe they would torture them,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters Monday. “And we do — and we do get assurances on those matters.”

But at the same time McClellan seemed at a loss to explain what other reason there might be for turning a suspect over to Uzbekistan.

“I’m not going to get into talking about specific intelligence matters,” he said when questioned about the choice of Uzbekistan as a destination for rendition.
Moonie Times

If it is true, as it strongly appears to be, that Langley actually transferred individuals to Syria–an officially recognized state sponsor of terrorism–then rendition has taken Langley, the White House, and Congress into a positively surreal “realist” world.

The mind spins thinking how agency officials would phrase the sourcing notes on intelligence collected from Syrian debriefings:

Information collected by a foreign intelligence service that the United States now strongly suspects is aiding Iraqi insurgents; this intelligence service also has a long history of operationally aiding Palestinian terrorist organizations and the Lebanese Hezbollah, and colluding with Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps; this intelligence service may also have arranged the murder of Lebanon’s former prime minister, Rafik Hariri, and is one of the great drug-smuggling organizations in the world. However, in this particular instance, we believe we have properly calibrated this service’s possible ulterior motives and deem the intelligence collected by this service to be worthy of dissemination to the intelligence community for its consideration.
Weekly Standard