As revealed for the first time in an article in the Washington Post, By Dana Priest, on July 3, 2005, (HERE) , in 2002, the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, funded a top secret center in Paris, code-named "Alliance Base".It would give the necessary cover to countries that did not want to be perceived perceived as taking direction from the CIA.
The countries who have sent officers to be part of the top secret "Alliance Base" include:
Britain, France, Germany, Canada, Australia and the United States.
The center's working language is French, as revealed in the article, which would play down the U.S. role and the CIA main role.
The foreign operatives, are usually supervised by the CIA which was/is also in charge of selecting individuals for assignments, paying them and keeping them physically separate from their own institutions in Britain, France, Germany, Canada or Australia.
All activities of the "Alliance Base" have taken place through these secretive alliances between the CIA and these countries' intelligence services.
The work of the "Alliance Base" is that of of handfuls of U.S. intelligence case officers working with handfuls of foreign operatives.
The base selects its cases carefully, chooses a lead country for each operation, and that country's service runs the operation , be it a kidnapping(rendition) or wahtever is decided necessary.
The base objective is not that of sharing information among countries. Instead , besides being multinational, it plans operations. This was the status of the "program" when it was revealed in an article in the Washington Post, By Dana Priest, on July 3, 2005.
As revealed in the same article, it also provides a way for case officers to read information from their own country's law enforcement authorities, even when the country's law bars criminal authorities from sharing certain information directly with their intelligence agencies.
THE ARTICLE CAN BE READ HERE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/02/AR2005070201361.html?referrer=emailarticle
The existence of such secret alliances with the CIA can most probably shed some light on "operations" that actually took place when Canadian Citizens were "squeezed out of the country" and ended up in torture prisons. No wonder they want to keep every inquiry secret - so much to hide!
This "close relationship" of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service - CSIS and the CIA, which activities are now being scrutinized due to the possible illegality and even criminality, is probably one of the reasons why CSIS has been so diligent in covering up its "mistakes".
At the end of the day, the CIA was in charge but CSIS needs to save its face and will go to great lenghts to cover up its wrongdoings and complicty, as the Courts have been finding out.
Was CSIS just "following orders" of the CIA?For sure it was not gathering intelligence since this was not the objective of the "Alliance Base". Hopefully the truth will come out about the depths of the Canadian complicity with an abhorrent lawless American Torture program.
More on the topic and details about the Secret Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers at:
Foreign Network at Front of CIA's Terror Fight Joint Facilities in Two Dozen Countries Account for Bulk of Agency's Post-9/11 Successes By Dana Priest, Washington Post, November 18, 2005; HERE
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111702070_pf.html
