BERLIN, December 28, 2005 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - 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, a 22-year veteran of the CIA who resigned from the agency in 2004, told Thursday's issue of the German newsweekly Die Zeit, reported Agence France Presse (AFP) Wednesday, December 28.

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

The rendition program was first authorized by President Ronald Reagan in 1986.

Scheuer, who headed the CIA unit that tracked Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden from 1996 to 1999, said that he developed and led the "rendition" program.

The program development, he added, 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. 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."

The former CIA agent said that the agency had not managed to arrest or imprison any detainee itself at the time.

"That was done by the local police or secret services," he said, adding that the prisoners were never taken to US soil.

"President Clinton did not want that," he stressed.

But the program was changed under Clinton's successor, President George W. Bush, after the 9/11 attacks, Scheuer added.

"We started putting people in our own institutions -- in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo."

"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."

Bush has strongly defended such transfers as "vital to the nation's defense."

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice defended renditions on a trip to Europe this month as a "vital tool" for fighting international terrorism but insisted that Washington does not condone torture.

Scheuer bashed European countries for what he said hypocrisy in criticizing the Bush administration for its anti-terror tactics while benefiting from them.

"All the information we received from interrogations and documents, everything that had to do with Spain, Italy, Germany, France, England was passed on," he said.

Reports of clandestine CIA interrogation centers and transport flights for terror suspects emerged in November, along with suggestions of on-board torture sessions.

The European Union has threatened sanctions against any of its member states found to have been operating such secret prisons, or allowing their territory to be used for the transport of the phantom detainees.

Since 9/11, the CIA has rendered more than 100 people from one country to another, usually with well-documented records of abuse, without legal proceedings, according tot the Washington Post.

The US House of Representatives passed on December 19 final legislation banning torture, a move seen by experts as a congressional rebuke of Bush, who vehemently resisted the measure.