Last weekend I saw the excellent film The War Within (2005). The main character is a Pakastani student in Paris who is nabbed on the street (presumably by the CIA) and flown to Afghanistan where he is tortured. The experience transforms him and he is later smuggled into the US where he joins a terrorist cell in New Jersey. What the film shows is the US policy of "extraordinary rendition" – the outsourcing of torture. Amnesty International has a new report on extraordinary rendition – Below the Radar: secret flights to torture and ‘disappearance’ . The German citizen Kahled al-Masri is one of the lucky victims: he was let go, once it became apparent his abduction was a case of mistaken identity. Dozens of others – according to the Amnesty report – have simply vanished.
The practice of extraordinary rendition has led to a revolt inside the CIA. As fissure has opened up between the ‘SS contingent’ – who blindly follow orders – and the ‘Wehrmacht’ – those who resist the illegal actions and are worried about legal consequences. Ken Silverstein has a report on this internal conflict on the Harper’s Web site:
An ex-senior agency officer who keeps in contact with his former peers told me that there is a “a big swing” in anti-Bush sentiment at Langley. “I’ve been stunned by what I’m hearing,” he said. “There are people who fear that indictments and subpoenas could be coming down, and they don’t want to get caught up in it.”
This former senior officer said there “seems to be a quiet conspiracy by rational people” at the agency to avoid involvement in some of the particularly nasty tactics being employed by the administration, especially “renditions”—the practice whereby the CIA sends terrorist suspects abroad to be questioned in Egypt, Syria, Uzbekistan, and other nations where the regimes are not squeamish about torturing detainees. My source, hardly a softie on the topic of terrorism, said of the split at the CIA: “There’s an SS group within the agency that’s willing to do anything and there’s a Wehrmacht group that is saying, ‘I’m not gonna touch this stuff’.”
We know that the ‘Wehrmacht group’ has cause for concern. When the truth comes out, it is the low level operational people that will pay the price. Those at the top who developed the policy and gave the orders will no doubt emerge unscathed, or, like George Tenet, receive the Medal of Freedom.
