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Briefing before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs,
Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight
Subcommittee on Europe
"Extraordinary Rendition in U.S. Counterterrorism Policy: The Impact on Transatlantic Relations."

A Statement by Michael F. Scheuer
Former Chief, Bin Laden Unit, CIA
April 17, 2007

The Rendition Program

The CIA's Rendition Program began in late summer, 1995. I authored it, and then ran and managed it against al-Qaeda leaders and other Sunni Islamists from August, 1995, until June, 1999.

A.) There were only two goals for the program:

1.) Take men off the street who were planning or had been involved in attacks on U.S. or its allies.

2.) Seize hard-copy or electronic documents in their possession when arrested; Americans were never expected to read them.

3.) Interrogation was never a goal under President Clinton. Why?

• Because it would be a foreign intelligence or security service without CIA present or in control.
• Because the take from the interrogation would be filtered by the service holding the individual, and we would never know if it was complete or distorted.
• Because torture might be used and the information might be simply what an individual thought we wanted to hear.

B.) The Rendition Program was initiated because President Clinton, and Messrs. Lake, Berger, and Clarke requested that the CIA begin to attack and dismantle AQ. These men made it clear that they did not want to bring those captured to the U.S. and hold them in U.S. custody.

1.) President Clinton and his national security team directed the CIA to take each captured al-Qaeda leader to the country which had an outstanding legal process for him. This was a hard-and-fast rule which greatly restricted CIA's ability to confront al-Qaeda because we could only focus on al-Qaeda leaders who were wanted somewhere. As a result many al-Qaeda fighters we knew were dangerous to America could not be captured.

2.) CIA warned the president and the National Security Council that the U.S. State Department had and would identify the countries to which the captured fighters were being delivered as human rights abusers.

3.) In response, President Clinton et. al asked if CIA could get each receiving country to guarantee that it would treat the person according to its own laws. This was no problem and we did so.

• I have read and been told that Mr. Clinton, Mr. Burger, and Mr. Clarke have said since 9/11 that they insisted that each receiving country treat the rendered person it received according to U.S. legal standards. To the best of my memory that is a lie.

C.) After 9/11, and under President Bush, rendered al-Qaeda operatives have most often been kept in U.S. custody. The goals of the program remained the same, although the Mr. Bush's national security team wanted to use U.S. officers to interrogate captured al-Qaeda fighters

1.) This decision by the Bush administration allowed CIA to capture al-Qaeda fighters we knew were a threat to the United States without on all occasions being dependent on the availability of another country's outstanding legal process. This decision made the already successful Rendition Program even more effective.

D.) The following particulars about the Rendition Program may be of interest to you.

1.) From its start until today, the Program was focused on senior al-Qaeda leaders and not aimed at the rank-and-file members. With only limited manpower to conduct the Rendition Program, CIA wanted to inflict as much damage on al-Qaeda as possible and therefore focused on senior leaders, financiers, terrorist operators, field commanders, strategists, and logisticians.

2.) To the best of my knowledge, not a single target of rendition has ever been kidnapped by CIA officers. The claims to the contrary by the Swedish government regarding Mr. Aghiza and his associate, and those by the Italian government regarding Abu Omar, are either misstatements or lies by those governments.

• Indeed, it is passing strange that European leaders are here today to complain about very successful and security enhancing U.S. Government counterterrorism operations, when their European Union (EU) presides over the earth's single largest terrorist safe haven, and has done so for a quarter century. The EU's policy of easily attainable political asylum and its prohibition against deporting wanted or convicted terrorists to country's with the death penalty have made Europe a major, consistent, and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United States.

3.) Each and every target of a rendition was vetted by a battery of lawyers at CIA and not infrequently by lawyers at the National Security Council and the Department of Justice. For each rendition target, I, and then my successors as the chief of the bin Laden/al-Qaeda operations, had to prepare and present a written brief citing and explaining the intelligence information that made the rendition target a threat to the United States and/or its allies. If the brief persuaded the lawyers, the operation went ahead. If the brief was insufficient, the lawyers disapproved and no operation was conducted against that target until additional reliable evidence was collected.

• Let me be very explicit and precise on this point. Not one single al-Qaeda leader has ever been rendered on the basis of any CIA officer's "hunch" or "guess" or "caprice." These are scurrilous accusations that became fashionable after the Washington Post's correspondent Dana Priest revealed information that damaged U.S. national security and, as result, won a journalism prize for abetting America's enemies, and when such lamentable politicians as Senators McCain, Rockefeller, Graham, and Levin followed Ms. Priest's lead and began to attack the men and women of CIA who had risked their lives to protect America under the direct orders of two U.S. presidents and with the full knowledge of the intelligence committees of the United States Congress. Both Ms. Priest and the gentlemen just mentioned have behaved disgracefully, and ought to publicly apologize to the CIA's men and women who have executed the Rendition Program.

4.) To proceed, the Rendition Program has been the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States government. Americans are safer today because of the program, but that degree of safety will ebb as the Senators just mentioned slowly but surely destroy the program. If there are those in this Congress, in the media, in this country, or in Europe who believe that we would be safer if Khalid Shaykh Muhammed, Abu Zubaydah, Mr. Hambali, Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, Khalid bin Attash, and several dozen other senior al-Qaeda leaders were still free and on the street, then the educational systems and the reservoirs of common sense on both sides of the Atlantic are in much more dilapidated shape than I thought.

5.) On the issue of how rendered al-Qaeda leaders have been treated in prison, I am unable to speak with authority about the conditions these men found in the Middle Eastern prisons they were delivered to at President Clinton's direction. I would not, however, be surprised if their treatment was not up to U.S. standards, but this is a matter of no concern as the Rendition Program's goal was to protect America and the rendered fighters delivered to Middle Eastern governments are now either dead or in places from which they cannot harm America. Mission accomplished, as the saying goes.

Under President Bush, the rendered al-Qaeda fighters held in U.S. custody have been treated according to guidelines that were crafted by U.S. government lawyers, approved by the Executive Branch, and briefed to and permitted by at least the four senior members of the two congressional intelligence oversight committees.

6.) Finally, I will close by saying that mistakes may well have been made during my tenure as the chief of CIA's bin Laden operations, and, if there were errors, they are my responsibility. Intelligence information is not the equivalent of court-room-quality evidence, and it never will be. But I will again stress that no rendition target was ever approved or captured without a written brief composed of intelligence information that persuaded competent U.S. government legal authorities. If mistakes were made, I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and confusing business, and a well-supported chance to take action and protect Americans should always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether or not the intelligence data is air tight.

• To destroy the Rendition Program because of a mistake or two or more would be to sacrifice the protection of Americans to venal and prize-hungry reporters like Ms. Priest, grandstanding politicians like those mentioned above, and effete sanctimonious Europeans who take every bit of American protection offered them while publicly damning and seeking jail time for those who risk their lives to provide the protection. If the Rendition Program is halted, we will truly be able to say, by paraphrasing the late film actor John Wayne, that: War is tough, but it is a lot tougher if you are deliberately stupid.