This post of Parts III, IV, and V completes the German-English translation provided by Simplicius Redivivus. Parts I and II are here.

Michael Scheuer left the CIA in November 2004 after 22 years of service. From 1995 to 1999 he led the unit that hunted Osama bin Laden. From 2000 he was one of the counter-terrorism leaders in the CIA. During his service there he wrote a critique of American anti-terror policy (Imperial Hubris). Within the CIA Michael Scheuer is regarded as someone who “fouled his own nest.”


PART III

ZEIT: And since that time?

Scheuer: Fewer and fewer countries are taking these people back. That’s why most are in American hands. Naturally the number climbed. We are talking about hundreds, certainly not thousands.

ZEIT: One of your earlier colleagues is quoted with the remark that “extraordinary renditions” are “an abomination”.

Scheuer: If it’s an abomination to defend America, then this critic would feel right at home in the left wing of the Democratic Party. I think it’s more of a matter of lack of courage to handle the dirty work onesself.

ZEIT: Internal critics claim that the program went out of control after 2001.

Scheuer: The process of getting the approval of the lawyers for an operation is to this day a tortuous process. Europeans should not underestimate the crippling nature of American system of government.

ZEIT: What has changed legally since 2001?

Scheuer: Well, because we detain the people ourselves now, we are no longer such Pharisees [the English may well have been “hypocrites”]. You have to credit the Bush administration for behaving a little more courageously and doing its own dirty work. And in the newspaper I read that there are so-called “improved interrogation techniques”. That sounds as if one can now be a little rougher than before.

ZEIT: How do you explain that people died while being detaind by the CIA?

Scheuer: I don’t know anything about that. I just read about it in the newspaper.

ZEIT: There are reports of seriously abused people, even pictures …

Scheuer: As far as I understand the new interrogation methods, none of them should lead to deaths. If there were deaths, then I would assume that there was an excess. And of course that isn’t okay.

ZEIT: Apparently there were hundreds of CIA flights crossing Europe. Why was that necessary?

Scheuer: Somehow surreal, all that. The CIA operates throughout world. We transport people, equipment, and money around theglobe. If you want to supply the CIA in Iraq, you have to fly and refuel over Europe. That doesn’t mean that in each of these planes is a “bad guy”.

ZEIT: If I understand you correctly, you find the outcry in Europe amusing?

Scheuer: Very amusing, really.

ZEIT: Why do you need prisons in Eastern Europe?

Scheuer: I’m not sure there are any. It would surprise me.

ZEIT: I had hoped you would reveal where they are.

Scheuer: I’ll go along with Franklin Roosevelt D. and say: I think they are in Shangrila. Just this much: I don’t know why we would need such prisons. We have sufficient capacity elsewhere, especially in Iraq and Cuba. I knew nothing about these prisons in Eastern Europe when I was in the Agency. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything. Perhaps I didn’t need to know. And if there were any, then I can only assume that our European allies believed that they were supporting an operation that protected them as well as us.

ZEIT: How did the cooperation work with European allies, especially with Germany?

Scheuer: Before 2001, variable at best. I don’t believe that Germany is among our best allies. The Italians were always good, the British somewhat. The fundamental problem in Europe is of a basic sort: the immigration and asylum laws have have made the establishment of a hard core of terrorists who have been convicted elsewhere, and who are now citizens of European states. In addition, no-one can be deported to a country that has capital punishment.

ZEIT: The attitude to the death penalty has hindered cooperation?

Scheuer: Not just hindered. It was like a barrier. Out of principle we didn’t work in Europe. There are agreements from the Cold War, according to which we can’t state any operations in Europe. The CIA is bound to those to this day. We simply went to those places where it worked. There is no sense in banging your head against a wall.

PART IV

ZEIT: Why was the cooperation so changeable, apart from the question of capital punishment?

Scheuer: Churchill said in the late 1930’s: the Europeans always hope that the aligator eats them last. As long as the target of the terrorists was the United States, many in Europe were asking themselves why they should endanger themselves together with America.

ZEIT: How do that work when you wanted information in one of your cases? Let’s say, from your German colleagues?

Scheuer: Sometimes there was just no answer. Sometimes some of the questions were answered. Sometimes the response was: we don’t have much. Here is the little bit that we do have. There was just a lot of hemming and hawing.

ZEIT: Has that changed since the attack of 2001?

Scheuer: Yes, completely. But even after the attacks in New York, Madrid, and London, there is still this belief in Europe that they shouldn’t get too involved. This idea that you only endanger yourself if you support the Americans.

ZEIT: The invasion of Iraq gave many adherents to that point of view.

Scheuer: The Iraq invasion without a doubt broke the back of our whole anti-terrorism operation. And in the long term, the war will certainly have the effect that a second generation of well-trained fighters, European Muslims and European converts, will return to Europe. The first generation came in the 1990’s from the Balkans and Chechnya.

ZEIT: There’s the case of the German-Syrian Mohammed Haydar Zammar, who had connections to the so-called Hamburg Cell, that prepared the attack on the World Trade Center. The German justice system could bring no proof of a crime. The CIA seized the man in Morocco and took him to Syria. How am I supposed to imagine cooperation with the Germans in such a case?

Scheuer: It would surprise me if there wasn’t someone in the German intelligence service who was informed, though perhaps after the fact. In Washington there is a lot of fear of the Europeans’ criticism. That may sound odd in light of this president, but it’s still true.

ZEIT: Could it perhaps be the other way around? That German intelligence informed you where the man went when he left Germany?

Scheuer: Nothing is impossible, but I have no reason to suppose that.

ZEIT: The new Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble let it be known that the interrogation of Zammar in Syria had yielded useful results. Is that correct?

Scheuer: That is the case for the entire “extraordinary renditions program”. It strikes me as dishonest of the Europeans to critizes this operation so strongly. Because all the information from the interrogations, everything that that had to do with Spain, with Italy, with Germany, with France, with England, was passed on. And if you were to ask the intelligence agencies of those countries, they would say: the information that we received from the “extraordinary renditions program” of the CIA helped us.

ZEIT: So the Germans were the beneficiaries of your methods?

Scheuer: Of course.

ZEIT: The German Interior Minister has spoken in Parliament of three cases, in which German officials abroad were in the prisons with the German citizens. Would it be an exaggeration to say that the CIA is doing the dirty work for us Germans?

Scheuer: As I said: some criticism strikes me as hypocritical.

ZEIT: Would you rule out the possibility that mistakes were made and the wrong people were seized?

Scheuer: I am certain that there were mistakes. Clausewitz talked about the fog of war. Right now we are in the middle of it. If mistakes were made, reparations should be paid.

ZEIT: One of these cases appears to concern a German citizen, Khaled El-Masri, who was apprehended in the Balkans, brought to Afghanistan, and months later was released in the Balkans.

Scheuer: There you have a symbol for the confusion in a war. He would certainly not have been apprehended if there had been no dubious information.

ZEIT: The case seems more to be a symbol that it is better to entrust such questions to the police, prosecutors, and courts and not to the CIA.

Scheuer: If you want to consider Al-Qaida as a matter of criminal prosecution and then wait until we’ve lost, then you are correct. However, we are in a war. And the sooner we remove such matters from the realm of criminal prosecution and get them under the rules of the Geneva Convention, the better it will be for America, for Europe, and also for the Germans. If these people are prisoners of war, there is no legal process.

PART V

ZEIT: Mr. El-Masri says that he was tortured. He was in a CIA prison in Afghanistan.

Scheuer: If he was in a CIA prison, he was certainly not tortured. Period.

ZEIT: But he claims that he was.

Scheuer: That doesn’t surprise me. Maybe he wants to see some money. Everybody wants that.

ZEIT: He further maintains that a German interrogated him in Afghanistan. How is that possible?

Scheuer: I don’t know if that is true. It’s possible. Our government and our intelligence agencies do try to help NATO allies. If Germans interrogated him, then that suggests that the Germans believed that they could learn something from him.

ZEIT: How many such cases of European Muslims are there?

Scheuer: Not very many, because the Europeans don’t usually cooperate. Therefore we tried to get these people when they weren’t on European soil.

ZEIT: El-Masri was surprised that the American interrogators knew details from his daily life. This knowledge could only come from German intelligence agencies. Or did the CIA spy in Germany?

Scheuer: I am certain that such information didn’t come from us. If we had information about El-Masri’s activities in Germany, then they came from one of the German agencies. And that suggests that it was more than just a rumor or a suspicion that led to his arrest.

ZEIT: What is the future of the extraordinary renditions?

Scheuer: The program is probably dead. Because of the leaks, the revelations, and the criticism. And for those who bear responsibility in the intelligence agencies, the effect is sobering. None of those who ordered us to act as we did now admits it.