Published in the Sunday Times, 2/12/06
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.
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
âwith 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.
Porter Goss, who was appointed head of the CIA in August 2004
with a mission to ‘clean house’, has been angered by a series of leaks
from CIA insiders, including revelations about ‘black sites’ in Europe
where top Al-Qaeda detainees were said to have been held.
In last Friday’s New York Times, Goss wrote that leakers
within the CIA were damaging the agency’s ability to fight terrorism
and causing foreign intelligence organisations to lose confidence. ‘Too
many of my counterparts from other countries have told me, âYou
Americans can’t keep a secret’.’
Goss is believed to have blamed Grenier for allowing leaks to occur on his watch.
Since the appointment of Goss, the CIA has lost almost all its high-level directors amid considerable turmoil.
AB ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, a former executive director of the CIA who
resigned shortly after Goss’s arrival, said the leaks were unlikely to
stop soon, despite proposals to subject officers to more lie detector
tests.
Krongard said it was up to President George Bush to stop the
rot. ‘The agency has only one client: the president of the United
States,’ he said. ‘The reorganisation is the way this president wanted
it. If he is unwilling to reform it, the agency will go on as it is.’
‘History will judge how good an idea it was to destroy the teams and the programmes that were in place.’