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“Omar Suleiman, the CIA’s Man in Cairo and Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief”

Omar Suleiman's record: his role in the U.S. extraordinary rendition program, his close ties to Israel, and his personal involvement in the torture of prisoners.

Omar Suleiman started his career, in terms of relating to the United States, in the '80s. In 1993, he became the head of the Egyptian General Intelligence Services, which is just somewhat like the United States CIA. It does external security, but it's part of the military. In the 1990s—I mean, we’ve been thinking and hearing a lot about Suleiman’s role in the war on terror, extraordinary rendition, but for the United States, rendition began under Clinton. It was regular rendition rather than the extraordinary kind. And it was developed very much in cooperation with Egypt, and specifically with Suleiman, because at that time, as al-Qaeda was developing and engaging in attacks in Egypt and Africa and elsewhere, the desire was to be able to pick up, kidnap people and transfer them to countries for trial. And so, in the 1990s, a number of suspected Islamist terrorists were picked up in other countries, transferred to Egypt. So, Suleiman was at that point already facilitating this approach.

And Suleiman not only as the chief of Egyptian intelligence, but also ideologically deeply committed to an anti-Islamist politics, and something that endeared him certainly to George Bush when, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, just within days, President George Bush authorized the CIA to engage in a much different kind of program, establishing the black prisons, the extraordinary rendition program, which meant the right to kidnap people from anywhere and either disappear them into black sites or send them to third countries for torture by proxy. And Egypt was the primary destination, although other countries were also destinations for these American CIA torture flights.