Along the way, the panel’s top Republican suggested that President Bush had “a personality problem”; a top former CIA officer said that renowned FBI agent John O’Neill deserved to die at the World Trade Center; and a one-time U.S. diplomat disrupted the proceedings by jumping up and saying, “I don’t have to stand for this.”

But the immediate focus of the April 17 joint hearing of two House Foreign Affairs committees was a report by the European Parliament that labeled the CIA’s abduction program illegal and alleged that torture was being applied inside an archipelago of secret prisons across the continent.

Three European delegates were invited to expand on the findings by the hearing’s chairman, Massachusetts Democrat Bill Delahunt.

Italian delegate Carlo Fava called the rendition program “an illegal instrument used by the United States in the fight against terrorism.”

Jonathan Evans, a British parliamentarian who headed the delegation, complained that “as legislators, we’ve been excluded” from knowing what’s happening on their own soil.

Julianne Smith, a top European expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told the panel the program of “extraordinary rendition, along with the press revelations about secret U.S. prisons in Europe, have cast a dark shadow on our relationship with our European allies.”

Such talk has infuriated the CIA, whose boss, Michael V. Hayden denounced European “hypocrisy” at a private luncheon last month hosted by the German embassy, according to a leak in The Washington Post. European governments have not only known about, Hayden complained, but approved — and in most cases collaborated in — the CIA’s snatches.

Skewer
But last week it fell to Michael Scheuer, the CIA officer who launched the program in 1995 under the Clinton administration, to offer the most combative, public defense yet of the renditions, calling them “the single most effective counterterrorism operation ever conducted by the United States government.”

“Mistakes may well have been made during my tenure as the chief of CIA’s bin Laden operations,” said Scheuer,who, somewhat ironically, arrived at the hearing with a well-deserved reputation for skewering the Bush administration.

In his 2004 book “Imperial Hubris,” Scheuer called the attack on Iraq “an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat, but whose defeat offered economic advantages.”

But in the Rayburn building’s elegant hearing room last week, Scheuer stoutly defended the abduction program and attacked its critics.

“If there were errors” and innocent people were picked up, he said, “they are my responsibility. . . .Intelligence information is not the equivalent of court-room-quality evidence, and it never will be.”

Briskly reading a prepared statement, the bearded erstwhile operative denounced the parliamentary report, calling Europe “the earth’s single largest terrorist safe haven.”

“ The EU’s policy of easily attainable political asylum and its prohibition against deporting wanted or convicted terrorists to countries with the death penalty have made Europe a major, consistent, and invulnerable source of terrorist threat to the United States,” he asserted.

But Scheuer’s main intent seemed to deflect criticism from the CIA and lay it at the feet of senior White House officials and CIA lawyers, who he said approve every snatch proposed by the counterterrorism unit.

In doing so, he provided listeners with a rare public glimpse into what one long-ago CIA official-turned-critic, Victor Marchetti, called the “clandestine mentality,” an anything-goes mindset that separates CIA people from their brethren in the FBI, a law enforcement agency, and the Pentagon, whose spies for the most part are bound by military oaths.

“Sir, a half-assed bureaucrat like me,” he told Delahunt, the panel’s chairman, “is never going to take a prisoner anywhere in this world without the authority of the executive branch.”

And if the CIA gets the wrong man, he asserted, it’s not really the CIA operators’ fault.
“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,” he said, following “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 mistakes were made,” he went on to say, “I can only say that that is tough, but war is a tough and confusing business .”

Protecting Americans “should always trump other considerations, especially pedantic worries about whether or not the intelligence data is air tight.”

Apologize
The parliamentary report featured a handful of cases of mistaken identity, the most prominent of which was the ordeal of Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen suspected of terrorist ties and packed off to his native Syria in 2002.

Upon his release 375 days later, Arar said he had been brutally tortured.
The Canadian government, which had supplied U.S. intelligence with a dossier that prompted Arar’s detention in New York, reinvestigated his case, cleared him of all suspicion, issued him an apology and awarded him $11.5 million in compensation.

But the the CIA, Scheuer said under persistent questioning from the panel’s Democrats, owes neither Arar nor any other innocents picked up an apology.

“No, and if I had the same information sheet today, I’d go after him,” Scheuer said.
“But the Canadians say there’s absolutely no evidence,” countered Edward J. Markey, D-Mass.
“I would certainly not apologize to him, sir.”
If anything, the finger of blame should land on the Canadian government for “providing us with information that was incorrect,” he said.

But the panel was barking up the wrong tree, he insisted. It should be asking higher officials about mistakes and compensation.

“You’re forgetting that the CIA is a service organization that responds to the demands of the government whether the Republicans or the Democrats are in power,” he said. “It’s their decision, and it’s Congress’s decision. If they want to sign onto an agreement that prevents the United States from defending itself, then they should do that and worry about defending their decision.”

The CIA , he added, is not “in the business of cleaning up afterwards. We’re in the business of pre-emption.”
But, Delahunt persisted, “What about those who are clearly eventually determined to be innocent?”
“Mistakes are made, sir.”
“Mistakes are made.”
“Yes, sir. And if you can prove that there was not due diligence in designing the target package or assembling the information (for) that operation. . . then you have a case against someone. Otherwise, it’s a mistake.”

“It’s just a mistake.”
“That’s right,” Scheuer said. “They’re not Americans, and I really don’t care.” He spread his arms, smiling. “It’s just a mistake.”

“And if they’re not Americans,” Delahunt persisted, “you really don’t care.” He shuffled some papers. “That’s very interesting.”

The witness and the congressman seemed to be talking across a vast universe.
“I never got paid, sir, to be a citizen of the world,” Scheuer said. “Maybe you do.”
California’s Dana Rohrabacher, the panel’s top Republican, had invited Scheuer to testify, and didn’t miss the chance to needle Democrats about the CIA man’s anti-administration credentials.

Rohrabacher offered that he was “very sympathetic” about people wrongly pirated away by U.S. intelligence. There should be some mechanism to prevent that, he said.

And yes, suggested Rohrabacher, who had been an aide in the Reagan White House, maybe President Bush should apologize for the mistakes to put them behind us.

But Bush seemed to have a “personality problem” with apologies, Rohrabacher said, frowning.
“I have worked in the White House and have seen first executives up close and in very many different administrations,” he added, leaving it at that.

But when Rohrabacher laced into the European parliamentarians, mocking and dismissing their concerns over “due process” and other legal niceties, the hearing room roiled.

“Here we’ve got a fellow who said he was tortured at Guantanamo,” Rohrabacher said, tapping a document. “How do we know that he was tortured? Probably because he said he was tortured. Why give the benefit of the doubt to people involved with the Taliban?”

“I think,” said Sarah Ludford, vice-chairwoman of the parliamentary committee, leaning into the microphone and offering a well known detail of the case, “one of the sources was the FBI.”

Rohrabacher fumed.
“We’re at war . . . wouldn’t Europeans have supported the rendition of (Adolph) Eichmann?” he asked, referring to the notorious Nazi fugitive that Israeli commandos snatched in Buenas Aires.

“I’m not sure the Eichmann example is a good one,” softly offered Evans, the British parliamentarian. Eichmann was brought to trial in Israel, not whisked off to a secret prison, he reminded.

Roar
Rohrabacher tried another avenue. The CIA had made “maybe three” mistaken arrests, he told the Europeans.
Weren’t they maybe obsessing over “due process”? he said. Their concern for civil rights could have “the unfortunate consequence” of helping al Qaeda kill tens of thousands of people in London.

At that, the Code Pink ladies in orange Guantanamo-style jumpsuits who had sat quietly through the hearing began clucking in a “can-you-believe that ?” way. The parliamentarians’ jaws cracked open.

Now Rohrabacher was really annoyed.
“Well then,” he barked, “I hope it’s your families. I hope it’s your families that suffer the consequences.”
A roar went up. One of the orange jumpsuiters, a grandmotherly woman with a “no torture” sign, pushed toward the aisle as if a dog had vomited on her lap.

“I don’t have to listen to this,” she said.
Outside, Ann Wright said she had spent “29 years in the military and 16 years as a diplomat,” which included helping reopen the U.S. consulate in Kabul after the Taliban was ousted, before resigning over the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq.

“For that asshole to say that stuff is outrageous,” she fumed, drawing shushes from comrades amid a growing cluster of orange in the corridor. Capitol Police rushed to quell the disturbance.

Back inside, Scheuer was just getting warmed up.
Delahunt, an experienced prosecutor, was drawing Scheuer into a series of increasingly harsh statements about critics of the rendition program.

Scheuer obligingly denounced Washington Post reporter Dana Priest for revealing ”information that damaged U.S. national security and, as result, won a journalism prize for abetting America’s enemies.” He called John McCain, R-Ariz.,, who helped craft last year’s anti-torture legislation, “a perfect example of a man who is terrifically courageous and has a lot of patriotism but not necessarily a correlation with brainpower.”

Not even John O’Neill, the late, legendary FBI counterterrorism agent who died in the World Trade Center inferno, escaped one of Scheuer’s shots.

Delahunt reminded Scheuer that the CIA man had once said O’Neill “was interested only in furthering his career and disguising the rank incompetence of senior FBI leaders.”

“Yes, sir,” said Scheuer, peering back through light-reflecting glasses.
“I think I also said that the only good thing that happened to America on 11 September,” he said, “is that the building fell on him, sir.”

And with that, the room for once fell silent.
Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.
Source: CQ Homeland Security
© 2007 Congressional Quarterly Inc. All Rights Reserved.