Tip Off

But the examples that Dyck cited in her response—as well as other public references to renditions prior to Goss’s comments to Grey—involved instances in which the practice was mentioned as a legal tool by which U.S. government agents in the FBI or the CIA apprehended suspects overseas and brought them back to the United States to stand trial in courts of law.

For example, Webster’s November 1989 comments to The Washington Post refer to the Justice Department’s efforts to apprehend suspects in the bombing of Pam Am Flight 103 over Scotland the previous year and bringing them back to stand trial in the United States. The paper’s report, based on an interview with Webster, reported that the Justice Department had created a new term—“rendition”—to describe the act of capturing and bringing back to the United States a “criminal suspect.”

Similarly, Tenet’s 2000 testimony on the CIA Web site refers to how the CIA, working with foreign governments worldwide, had “helped to render more than two dozen terrorists to justice.”

But as Grey documents in his book, and has been independently confirmed by numerous news organizations, as well as senior Bush administration officials, the CIA’s program after September 11 evolved into something very different and far more controversial. Under the post-9/11 CIA program, known as extraordinary rendition, agency officials have abducted terror suspects who had never been indicted for any crimes and then flown them to either secret agency prisons or to foreign countries such as Egypt or Syria where they have been allegedly interrogated using aggressive techniques that critics charge amounts to torture.

Rand Beers, a former top counterterror official in the Bush White House who later resigned and became a critic of the administration, says Goss, as chairman of the Intelligence Committee, would likely have been briefed about some classified aspects of the emerging extraordinary-rendition program at the time he made his comments to Grey.

To be sure, Goss made no explicit reference to the details of extraordinary rendition in his comments to the British journalist and even the little he did say involved talk about rendering suspects in order to “bring them to some type of justice.” Still, the disclosure that Goss may have played any role at all in the disclosure of the CIA’s secret programs may well be pounced on by critics, given his fierce condemnation of any leaks at all when he was CIA director.