EX CIA OFFICIAL: CLINTON STARTED RENDITION PROGRAM
ABC, AUSTRALIA - The US Central Intelligence Agency's controversial
"rendition" program was launched under US president Bill Clinton, a
former US counter-terrorism agent has told a German newspaper. Michael
Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in
2004, has told Die Zeit that the US administration had been looking in
the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent
the cumbersome US legal system.
"President Clinton, his national security adviser Sandy Berger and his
terrorism adviser Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to
destroy Al Qaeda," Mr Scheuer said. "We asked the president what we
should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."
Mr Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al Qaeda leader Osama
bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, says he developed and led the "renditions"
program. He says the program includes moving prisoners without due legal
process to countries without strict human rights protections. "In Cairo,
people are not treated like they are in Milwaukee," he said.
"The Clinton administration asked us if we believed that the prisoners
were being treated in accordance with local law. "And we answered, 'yes,
we're fairly sure'.". . .
He says the program changed under Mr Clinton's successor, President
George W Bush, after the attacks of September 11, 2001. "We started
putting people in our own institutions - in Afghanistan, Iraq and
Guantanamo," he said. "The Bush administration wanted to capture people
itself but made the same mistake as the Clinton administration by not
treating these people as prisoners of war."
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