Tuesday, February 14, 2006

Get With The Program!



Well, it's too late now for Robert Grenier who used to be the head of the CIA's counter-terrorism center. He was fired last week. According to the UK Times, it was because he wasn't that much into torture and secret prisons and all that other wingnutty stuff:

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 '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.

Porter Goss seems to blame Grenier for the leaks instead. Did you know that Goss has gotten rid of almost all the top guys in the CIA? It's like erasing the whole memory bank.