Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (53 page)

5.
In addition to the August 20, 1998, cruise missile on the Khowst camps, another set of missiles simultaneously hit a drug-manufacturing facility in Khartoum that Washington believed was involved in producing chemical weapons.

6.
It is worth worrying how Washington’s unwillingness to use its military power to defeat insurgents armed with forty-year-old weaponry is perceived by nation-states that are deemed a threat to the United States, such as Russia, China, North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran. The willingness of U.S. leaders to let their country be defeated in two wars rather than risk international condemnation for using military power too brutally must surely make our nation-state rivals question how credible U.S. resolve is to hold them in check. Such questioning could lead to a bit of envelope-pushing by our rivals to see how far they can go in defying America.

7.
Because I am one of the chief architects of the CIA’s rendition program against al-Qaeda, I am often asked whether the program was worthwhile. My answer always is a most emphatic yes. Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Abu Zubaydah, Kahlid bin Attash, and another twenty or so senior al-Qaeda leaders would be working to defeat America and kill its citizens if it were not for CIA rendition program operations. The program, I believe, is the single most successful U.S. counterterrorism program, and the men and women who have risked their lives to execute it deserve the thanks of their countrymen. I also would note (for those who are concerned with such things) that in my almost twenty years of managing CIA covert operations, the rendition program received the most intense scrutiny from lawyers, politicians, senior civil servants, and congressional overseers of any I was associated with.
     That said, the program has never been properly understood by Americans or the media. When it was created, the program had only two goals: (1) to find, apprehend, and incarcerate Islamists involved in anti-U.S. operations, and (2) to seize from them at the time of their capture any paper or electronic documents they possessed; on these documents was information never intended to be read by the U.S. clandestine service. Capturing senior al-Qaeda fighters was never predicated on what we might be able to learn from them via interrogation; to receive legal permission to execute an operation, the documentary evidence of terrorist activities had to be conclusive; no individual was ever picked up because someone had a hunch he would have something interesting to say. In addition, we did not think interrogation would produce much of worth because we knew al-Qaeda fighters were trained to respond to their questioners with fabricated information or a great deal of accurate information that was dated, would take long periods of time to exploit, and would ultimately lead to no follow-up operations.
     Why, then, were captured al-Qaeda fighters taken to third countries, a practice the media have described as outsourcing torture? The answer lies in the decision that President Clinton, National Security Adviser Sandy Berger, and terrorism chief Richard Clarke made not to bring captured al-Qaeda fighters to the United States. The U.S. legal system, they argued, could not abide the manner in which these men were captured—no Miranda rights—or the fact that no U.S. law-enforcement official would be able to testify under oath that the individual had not been abused when arrested, or that his media had not been tampered with after his capture. On this assumption Mr. Clinton and his team approved taking the captured men to countries where there were already existing legal charges against them. In almost all cases the charges were terrorism-related, and some of those captured had been convicted of crimes in absentia. They were taken to third countries, therefore, because President Clinton had directed the CIA to take them there. At the time this reasoning seemed to me to accurately reflect the incompatibility between rendition and standard trial procedures in the U.S. court system. More important, it allowed the CIA to execute the president’s program for getting senior al-Qaeda fighters who were threats to America off the street.
     Notwithstanding this benefit, however, senior CIA officers repeatedly reminded the Clinton national security team that the Islamist fighters acquired via rendition operations were being taken to states that the U.S. State Department routinely cited as human-rights abusers. In response, the White House tasked the CIA to request assurance from each foreign government that received an al-Qaeda fighter that the prisoner would be treated according to that country’s laws. In other words, State X would have to pledge that it would treat the al-Qaeda fighter according to the laws of State X. Needless to say, the prisoner-receiving government always made this assurance, and it was passed to the White House. At no time in my experience did the president or his advisers ever task the CIA to solicit from a prisoner-receiving country a guarantee that an al-Qaeda fighter would be treated according to U.S. legal standards or the norms of international law. Claims made by former Clinton administration officials to the contrary are lies.
     The problem with the rendition program is that it has emerged as the major counterterrorism tool of the U.S. government. The program was never intended to be, or capable of being, the instrument through which al-Qaeda would be defeated. Al-Qaeda is far too large an organization to be defeated by what President Clinton and President George W. Bush have described as a process of “arresting them one man at a time and bringing them to justice.” The CIA’s rendition program was and is successful in picking off senior al-Qaeda leaders and thereby keeping al-Qaeda off balance because of the need to replace talented leaders. It was not and is not the means to victory, and that it is now thought of as such speaks again to the pernicious effect of Cold War hangovers: the constant search for third-country proxies to handle captured rendition targets; the fear of applying strong military force even after it is clear that arresting Islamists one at a time does not adequately protect America; and the willingness of presidential administrations from both parties to be intimidated by human-rights groups and vote-seeking politicians like Senator McCain and Senator Carl Levin (D-Michigan) (Michigan is a large Muslim-population state) into neutering the one counterterrorism program that was producing positive and measurable results. My congressional testimony on the rendition program can be read in “Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Trans Atlantic Relations,” April 17, 2007, serial 110–28, http://foreignaffairs.house.gov/110/34712.pdf.

8.
Quoted in Woodward,
Bush at War
, 65.

9.
Ibid. In July 2007 the National Intelligence Estimate came close to officially recognizing General Powell’s mistake in identifying the 9/11 raids as an attack on the entire Western community (rather than what it was, a direct attack only on the United States) by noting its concern that the “level of international cooperation [against al-Qaeda] may wane as 9/11 becomes a more distant memory and perceptions of the threat diverge.” The term “perceptions of the threat diverge” appears to be a bureaucratic nicety that means that the Intelligence Community anticipates that our non-English-speaking allies will come to see that they are on al-Qaeda’s bull’s-eye list only as long as they are overtly aiding the United States. See “NIE: The Terrorist Threat to the U.S. Homeland,” July 17, 2007.

10.
Osama bin Laden, “Statement to the Peoples of Countries Allied to [the] Tyrannical U.S. Government,”
Alneda
(online), November 21, 2002.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Ibid.

13.
Ibid.

14.
Osama bin Laden, “Speech to the Peoples of Europe,” Al-Arabiyah Television, April 15, 2004.

15.
Ibid.

16.
“Spanish Government Admits Defeat,” http://news.bbc.co.uk., March 15, 2004; Isambard Wilkonson, “Election Blow of Bush’s War on Terrorism,” www.telegraph.co.uk, March 15, 2004; and Faye Bowers, “Do Terrorists Play Election Politics?”
Christian Science Monitor,
March 17, 2004.

17.
“Official Results: Prodi Defeats Berlusconi,” Associated Press, April 11, 2006.

18.
Kevin Sullivan and Mary Jordan, “Blair Says He Will Step Down Within 12 Months,”
Washington Post,
September 8, 2006, A-12.

19.
Sebastian Berger, “Thailand Coup Raises Hope for a Deal with Muslim Insurgents,” www.telegraph.co.uk, September 29, 2006, and Kim Barker, “Gleam Is off Thailand’s Quiet Coup,”
Chicago Tribune
, December 10, 2006.

20.
Craig Gordon, “When Did Bush Know?” www.newsday.com, June 2, 2006; Ruxandra Adam, “Maliki Slams U.S. Military for Attack,” http://news.softpedia.com, August 8, 2006; Fisnik Abrashi, “Karzai: Attacks Wearing Thin on Afghans,” Associated Press, December 8, 2006; “Karzai Criticizes Foreign Tactics,” www.newsvote.bbc.co.uk, June 22, 2006; Tim Abalone and Michael Evans, “Karzai Wants Rethink on Terror War as al-Qaeda Urges Uprising,” www.timesonline.co.uk, June 23, 2006.

21.
“France Will Withdraw Some Forces from Afghanistan,”
International Herald Tribune,
December 17, 2006, and Elaine Ganley, “French Pull Troops from Afghanistan,”
Washington Post,
December 20, 2006.

22.
Alan Cowell, “Britain to Pull 1,600 Troops out of Iraq, Blair Says,”
New York Times,
February 21, 2007; Mark Rice-Oxley, “As U.S. Surges, British Start Exiting Iraq,”
Christian Science Monitor
, February 22, 2007.

23.
Ian Fisher, “Italian Prime Minister Resigns,”
New York Times,
February 22, 2007, and Phil Stewart, “Italy’s Prodi Quits After Foreign Policy Defeat,”
Boston Globe,
February 21, 2007.

24.
Kim Murphy, “New Polish Premier Pledges Iraq Pullout,”
Los Angeles Times,
November 24, 2007; Tim Johnston, “Bush Ally Defeated in Australia,”
New York Times,
November 25, 2007; and Rohan Sullivan, “Australian Troops Home from Iraq in 2008,” Associated Press, November 30, 2007.

25.
Sachiko Sakamaki, “Fukuda Fails to Renew Japan Deployment for Afghan War,” www.bloomberg.com, November 1, 2007; Jung Sung-ki, “Troop Pullout from Afghanistan Starts,” www.koreatimes.com, August 30, 2007; “Cost of Afghan War a ‘biggie’ for Dutch; not so much in Canada,” www.canadianpress.google.com, October 30, 2007; “Sarkozy Favors French Afghan Withdrawal,” news.brisbane times.com.au, April 27, 2007; and Thomas Walkom, “Memo for Minister McKay: The Hearts and Minds campaign Isn’t Working. It’s Time to Talk Peace with the Taliban,”
Toronto Star
(online), August 18, 2007.

26.
Pape,
Dying to Win
, 129–39.

27.
For America’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence services, this reality is new, unique, and profoundly disquieting. Historically all three services are assigned tasks to further the implementation and success of U.S. foreign policy. Now, however, a successful effort in support of any U.S. policy on which bin Laden has focused Muslim attention worsens America’s problems. The U.S. military overthrows Saddam’s regime and occupies Iraq; Muslims see the fulfillment of the Koran’s guidelines for a defensive jihad. U.S. diplomats support Beijing’s contention that Muslim Uighur separatists are terrorists; heretofore-neutral Uighurs become anti-American. Intelligence officers provide data to Saudi Arabia that allows the capture and incarceration of local mujahedin; Saudi Islamists harden their view that Riyadh is an un-Islamic, American agent. In reality, an event that U.S. leaders view as a success for their policies can often truly be a case of one step forward and two—or more—steps back.

28.
Little should be made of the upticks in U.S. popularity that always occur after U.S. relief aid is delivered to the scene of natural disasters in the Muslim world, such as the post-9/11 tsunami in Indonesia and the earthquake in Pakistani Kashmir. This aid reinforces the admiration that Muslims already have for American generosity, but it does nothing to lessen their animosity toward our foreign policies. Muslims make a clear and broad separation between the two sets of issues.

29.
Bernard Lewis,
What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).

30.
See, for example, “Christian Evangelist Franklin Graham Blasts Islam, Says Will Rebuild Churches in Sudan,” Associated Press, October 9, 2006.