Top Former CIA Agent Condemns New Terror War

"It is totally reactionary," he insists. "It's like they woke up on 9/11 and just started shooting at anybody and anything."
To give just one example, he says that what is referred to as "extraordinary renditions" - the controversial practice of secretly spiriting suspects to other countries without due process - is not only wrong, but often counterproductive for gathering intelligence.
"They are picking up people really with nothing against them, hoping to catch someone because they have no information about these [terrorist] networks."
According to Baer, what happened after 9/11 was a kind of knee-jerk reaction by the CIA, taking in thousands of contractors and dispatching everybody they could, at the expense of real expertise and experienced operatives.
This desperation, he says, led to a "do anything approach" and "that's why we ended up with Guantanamo and arresting a lot of people that were innocent."