13 February, 2006

Another CIA chief bites the dust

Apparently it just wasn't for leaks on his watch, but because he "wasn't with the program." From the the Times of London:

The CIA’s top counter-terrorism official was fired last week because he opposed detaining Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons abroad, sending them to other countries for interrogation and using forms of torture such as “water boarding”, intelligence sources have claimed.

Robert Grenier, head of the CIA counter-terrorism centre, was relieved of his post after a year in the job. One intelligence official said he was “not quite as aggressive as he might have been” in pursuing Al-Qaeda leaders and networks.


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Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of counter-terrorism at the agency, said: “It is not that Grenier wasn’t aggressive enough, it is that he wasn’t ‘with the programme’. He expressed misgivings about the secret prisons in Europe and the rendition of terrorists.”

Grenier also opposed “excessive” interrogation, such as strapping suspects to boards and dunking them in water, according to Cannistraro.


Note the comments come from a past occupant of the same post. It seems a lot of professional insiders are unhappy with Bush and company, and a lot of the Bush people are unhappy with them. I have no problem with a shakeup at the CIA. They've needed it for years. But this threatens to turn the agency into something even worse that what it was before. The administration's policy on torture is as stupid as it is illegal. If that's "the program," it's time to end it.

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