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Former CIA chief says flights caused problems for allies

The former head of CIA covert operations in Europe admitted on Thursday night that "extraordinary rendition" -- the practice of transferring detainees to camps, including Guantanamo Bay, where they risked being tortured -- had caused serious problems for US allies.

"We have put our allies in a very difficult position," said Tyler Drumheller, who was in charge of the CIA's clandestine activities in Europe until 2005.

He said the way the issue of rendition flights was handled was one of the reasons he resigned. He told BBC TV's Mystery Flights, which aired on Thursday, that it affected "the willingness of other countries to work with us -- the intelligence services and police forces of other countries we go to".

"It makes it difficult even if those countries do want to help us ... because there's all this bad publicity and they're at risk of violating their own laws and that sort of thing," he said.

Asked where the buck stopped, Drumheller replied: "The president's the president ... I blame the administration for creating an atmosphere of ... rage and vengeance."

"The people up the line need to have responsibility for what happened ... They wanted to draw a line so that there was no direct line from what happened to their authority and that's not right," he said.

Asked if he was referring to "deniability," he replied: "Deniability, to put it in plain English, yeah."

Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of British intelligence (MI6), said in little-noted remarks at a conference in Aspen, Colorado, last year, that CIA rendition flights "would have been illegal under British common law."

The British government has admitted that aircraft suspected of being used for "extraordinary rendition" have passed through British airports on 73 occasions since 2001.
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