Former US President Bill Clinton was the first to use the CIA's rendition program to capture, transfer and question terror suspects on foreign soil, a former US counterterrorism agent has revealed.

"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," Michael Scheuer, a22 -year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in2004 , told Thursday's issue of the German newsweekly Die Zeit, reported Agence France Presse (AFP) Wednesday, December28 .

"We asked the president what we should do with the people we capture. Clinton said 'That's up to you'."

Regarding what’s happened to militants captured as early as 1995:

Scheuer: “I don’t think anybody has been released. … People we picked up are being held someplace else. I don’t think we held anyone until after 9/11. But the rendition program initially delivered people to countries where they were wanted. [These people are either still incarcerated] or they’re dead. We never picked up anyone who wasn’t wanted by the authorities.

“The rendition program was designed to do two things: to take people off the streets that we knew were a threat to the United States, and two, at the time of their arrest, to pick up any hard-copy documents they had. No one was ever picked up so they could be talked to. Any intelligence service will tell you that al-Qaeda guys are trained to fight from the jail cell by giving false information mixed with some good information that’s dated. …

If we die as a nation, Lincoln once said, it will be an act of national suicide. And so it seems we are. The media, led by The Washington Post, and Congress, led by Arizona Sen. John McCain, are moving America to disaster's brink by intentionally destroying its most successful counterterrorism tool: the CIA's rendition program.

Spurred by The Post's traditional lust for compromising national security for no reason save selling copy, and abetted by Mr. McCain's ignorant grandstanding and shameless exploitation of his POW record to sate his presidential lust, the CIA program that best defends America will soon be laid to rest. Around the grave The Post, Mr. McCain and the pacifist Democrats and their European idols will rejoice over burying what they have misidentified as "torture operations." Instead, they will have destroyed America's main offensive weapon against al Qaeda.

This disaster began nearly a year ago. First, the intrepid Post reporters revealed the tail number of an aircraft purportedly used by CIA to move captured militants. A piece of information of no news value, but titillating to the world's media and incentive to America's European enemies to destroy the cover of a covert-action capability that took years to perfect. How, thanks to The Post, the CIA's clandestine counterterrorism cooperation with several allies has been exposed or reported incorrectly, time will tell -- thereby severely diminishing the chance of further such cooperation. Unavoidably, this will weaken America against al Qaeda and result in more dead Americans. For The Post, thousands of American corpses are apparently not too much of a price to pay for selling papers and perhaps bagging a Pulitzer.

Scheuer's position is in sync with much of what he has written. He is furious with the Clinton White House (notably former National Security Adviser Sandy Berger and his buddy at the NSC, Richard Clarke) for giving CIA orders to go after the terrorists without also providing the wherewithal to deal with such terrorists as they might capture. The unfortunately named process of "rendition," a word the illiterates in the government use to describe the process of turning over terrorists to friendly governments for interrogation, was a CIA solution to a problem created by the Clinton White House. And Scheuer is concerned that his friends and former colleagues at the agency will end up taking the rap that justly should be delivered to the failed policymakers.

O‘DONNELL: But many people have made the impression that something in the Bush administration was done wrong. But there‘s evidence that the Clinton administration knew full well that bin Laden had the wherewithal and was planning to attack the United States. Who is to blame and did the president, Clinton, get this information?

SCHEUER: Certainly the president got the information. And most certainly his closest adviser, Sandy Berger and Mr. Clarke—Richard Clarke, had the information from 1996 forward that bin Laden intended to attack the United States. There‘s no question of that. And in terms of which administration had more chances, Mr. Clinton‘s administration had far more chances to kill Osama bin Laden than Mr. Bush has until this day.

O‘DONNELL: That‘s very interesting. I don‘t think that many Americans know that or think that everything that they‘ve heard—you‘ve spent your life tracking Osama bin Laden. From what we know now and what you know, how many missed opportunities were there to prevent the 9/11 attacks?

SCHEUER: Well, we had—the question of whether or not we could have prevented the attacks is one you could debate forever. But we had at least eight to 10 chances to capture or kill Osama bin Laden in 1998 and 1999. And the government on all occasions decided that the information was not good enough to act.

“We are at the point where we can no longer tolerate that Israel dictates the policy the U.S. must follow. It’s time we play the great power in the relationship and not the minor power. Fifty years is enough, I think Israel should do whatever it needs to do to defend itself. I have no qualms about that, but I don’t think it’s worth one dead American.”

In May of 1998, after months of planning, officials called off a CIA plan to have Afghan allies capture bin Laden and send him out of Afghanistan for trial. The plan was apparently scrapped because of worries about the chance of killing bystanders, and even bin Laden himself, as well as concerns over the strength of the legal evidence against bin Laden.

Ms. Rice said the practice is legal under international law. She said renditions do not involve torture.

"The United States does not transport and has not transported detainees from one country to another for the purpose of interrogation using torture," she said. "The United States does not use the airspace or the airports of any country for the purpose of transporting a detainee to country where he or she will be tortured. The United States has not transported anyone and will not transport anyone to a country when we believe he will be tortured. Where appropriate, the United States seeks assurances that transferred persons will not be tortured."

Interviewed right after Ms. Rice's statement, former CIA officer Michael Scheuer, who ran the rendition programs at one time, said Ms. Rice is right.

"Under the Bush Administration that is exactly correct," said Mr. Scheuer. "Under the Clinton Administration it is exactly wrong. The Clinton Administration preferred to take people to places like Egypt and other countries where human-rights abuses are well-documented."

Mr. Scheuer added that as controversial as renditions have been, they have proved extremely useful.

"I think Ms. Rice is perfectly accurate," he added. "And what she does not say is because most U.S. leaders do not take the terrorist problem seriously, the rendition program remains the single most important tool in the kitbox of the American government. It has been tremendously successful."