Arab Spring Has Created ‘Intelligence Disaster’, Warns Former CIA Boss
IN FOCUS, 29 Aug 2011
Charlotte Higgins – The Guardian
Michael Scheuer says rendition should be brought back as lack of intelligence has left UK and US unable to monitor militants.
The Arab spring has “delighted al-Qaida” and caused “an intelligence disaster” for the US and Britain, the former head of the CIA unit in charge of pursuing Osama bin Laden has warned.
Speaking at the Edinburgh international book festival, Michael Scheuer said: “The help we were getting from the Egyptian intelligence service, less so from the Tunisians but certainly from the Libyans and Lebanese, has dried up – either because of resentment at our governments stabbing their political leaders in the back, or because those who worked for the services have taken off in fear of being incarcerated or worse.
“The amount of work that has devolved on US and British services is enormous, and the result is blindness in our ability to watch what’s going on among militants.”
The Arab spring, he said, was “an intelligence disaster for the US and for Britain, and other European services”.
Scheuer headed the Bin Laden unit at the CIA from 1996 to 1999, and worked as special adviser to its chief from 2001 to 2004. The author of a biography of Bin Laden, he now teaches on the peace and security affairs programme at the University of Georgetown.
He said: “The rendition programme must come back – the people we have in custody now are pretty long in the tooth, in terms of the information they can provide in interrogations.
“The Arab spring has been a disaster for us in terms of intelligence gathering, and we now are blind both because of the Arab spring and because there is nothing with which to replace the rendition programme.”
Go to Original – guardian.co.uk
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For one thing, the population of the planet has increased from five billion to seven billion people during the last twenty-five years. People at Georgetown University have striven to stem this growth in the world’s population – a statistic that most Americans seem oblivious too, which is a modern miracle, given the technology that exists to disseminate information. The government has no cause to act surprised at the developments in the Arab world. The CIA has a yearbook that provides these alarming demographic facts, yet for some reason that organization has failed to act in a timely manner to coordinate this information with the proper channels for positive action. Thus, the problem is not necessarily just with THEM. The problem is that the social institutions of the planet – East and West – have failed in their stewardship to avert violence, which, like pharmaceuticals, is a big business.