Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program by Stephen Grey, a London-based journalist for the New York Times and other publications, will most likely touch off an anti-Bush media feeding frenzy in the closing weeks of 2006 congressional campaign.
What is not in Grey’s book is even more explosive – and may damage Hillary Clinton more than George Bush. It is revealed here for the first time.
I spoke with Grey this weekend. He revealed that the CIA’s ability to covertly transport terrorists – a process known as rendition – has been hobbled by boneheaded legal restrictions and laughably poor spycraft. These legal restrictions were imposed during the Clinton era but never lifted by President Bush.
“One CIA pilot told me that in the mid 1990s, when Clinton was president, that the lawyers began to take over. Previously, they used to take CIA planes into hangars all the time, re-spray them, and come out with a different tail number. That way none of the tracing of CIA planes I’ve been doing since 9/11 would have been possible. The idea of flying around with one tail number for three years would have been thought completely nuts,” Grey told me. “But [Clinton-era] lawyers said they needed to stay legal. They even insisted that, to comply with FAA regulations, they needed stewardesses.”
Yes, stewardesses on CIA planes.
With these Clintonian legal rules, it was easy for amateur “plane spotters” around the globe to track the movements of the so-called secret CIA planes. Those plane spotters later pooled their information with Grey, who broke the news in a series of headlines damaging to Bush.
What’s even more “boneheaded” than the Clintonian approach to waging the war on terror is the fact that Democrats, even in this post-9/11 world, still want to wage the war on terror in that manner. They want lawyers to lead America into battle with its enemies, not soldiers.
Which is sad, because you don’t win a war with motions, objections and briefs.
We should remember that as election day approaches. Who do we want to do our nation’s fighting? The warriors or the lawyers?