The man who ran the Central Intelligence Agency's Bin Laden desk during the 1990s is accusing President Clinton of giving the CIA carte blanche to circumvent U.S. law and interrogate terrorist suspects in any way the agency saw fit - a directive that led to the establishment of secret CIA prisons on foreign soil.
"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture," recalled Michael Scheuer, who headed up the agency's Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999, in an interview Wednesday with the German newsmagazine Die Zeit.
Scheuer said Clinton replied: "That's up to you."
According to an Agence France Press summary of the Die Zeit interview, Scheuer explained that the Clinton administration "had been looking in the mid-1990s for a way to combat the terrorist threat and circumvent the cumbersome US legal system."
The top Bin Laden hunter recalled that the extralegal directive came after "President Clinton, his national security advisor Sandy Berger and his terrorism advisor Richard Clark ordered the CIA in the autumn of 1995 to destroy Al-Qaeda."
The secret CIA interrogation process became known as "renditioning," Scheuer said, explaining that it included 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 told Die Zeit. "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."
Scheuer's revelations contradict a much ballyhooed Nov. 2, 2005 report in the Washington Post, which insisted that "the secret detention system was conceived in the chaotic and anxious first months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."
After mistakenly claiming that renditioning began under President Bush, the Post noted that "considerable concern lingers [within the CIA] about the legality, morality and practicality" of the program.
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