Doc. 11302 Report 59. Our team has spoken with several American officials who have seen the text of the presidential finding and participated in the operations that put it into action. Two particularly striking observations have emerged from these discussions. First, by putting “a lot of stock in special activities”17the finding “redefined the role of the agency”, even in the eyes of some of its own, more conservative senior officials. Second, the “really broad, not specific” scope of the covert actions authorised in the finding meant that the CIA was instantly granted enough room for manoeuvre to design a secret detentions programme overseas.18 60. One senior former CTC official said the broad scope and enhanced paramilitary powers for the CIA were negotiated into the terms of the finding with “revenge for the 11 September 2001 attacks” in mind. Another former CTC official with direct responsibility for geographical areas in which al-Qaeda was operating told us: “This administration needed some public successes, so they put a lot more pressure on us to find these people, and they decided to hold these people themselves. I think those are the two major changes post-11 September 2001.” 61. Thus, there had emerged a category of terrorist suspects whom the CIA considered of high value and to whose capture, detention, transfer and interrogation it would ultimately dedicate an entire covert programme. The men in this category had mostly been picked out already as “high-value targets”, or HVTs, 19and once in the custody of the CIA they would become “high-value detainees”, or HVDs.20 62. The profile of the HVTs was that of orchestrators, planners, leading operatives and providers of logistics for some of the most devastating terrorist plots attributed to al-Qaeda and to its associates. In our discussions, current and former CIA officials have been keen to emphasise, even in hindsight, that their targets span only a very limited range. One asserted: “If you look down the list of the people we’ve picked up since 11 September 2001, the agency has maintained a very high level of pertinence in terms of our targets.” Another confirmed: “We didn’t want the insurgents; we wanted the leadership.” 63. CIA dossiers compiled on these men were comprehensive and constantly being updated. As my representative was told by Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the Bin Laden Unit: “The one problem we never had was lack of information.”21Intelligence on the HVTs was replete with references to their involvement in the 11 September 2001 attacks and the evolution of its feeder cells, or in other major events in the global escalation of terrorism, such as the dual attack on American embassies in East Africa, the assault on the United States navy ship USS Cole, or the Bali nightclub bombings. 64. Just as the CIA rendition programme – instigated in the 1990s and escalated in the post-11 September 2001 years – maintained its “safety net” of having obtained legal approval for every operation it launched, 22the CIA’s post-11 September 2001 HVD programme was designed and vetted in consultation with various lawyers in the Justice Department, the CIA and in the presidential administration. All three of these sets of lawyers, as our sources confirmed, have approved so-called “Kill, Capture or Detain” orders, or “KCD orders”, for high-value targets with whom the CIA came into contact. 17. The Special Activities Division is akin to a paramilitary wing of the CIA; the kinds of “activities” referred to here include renditions and, in exceptional circumstances, assassinations of suspected al-Qaeda members. 18. I am certain that the HVD programme has its general origins in the 17 September 2001 finding, because our sources were unanimous on the question of the latitude this document afforded to the CIA. However, we were also told separately of the existence of further classified documents (thought to have been signed in 2002) that actually use the term “black sites” in relation to specific facilities. 19. Public citations of the acronym “HVT” have become more common in the course of the “war on terror”. It is commonly used, for example, among members of the United States armed forces, particularly those who have been deployed to track down prominent Baath’ists and insurgents in Iraq, such as Uday and Qu’say Hussein, or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. See Defense Technical Information Center, “Loss of High-Value Targets” available at http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/doddict/ data/h/02467.html. 20. The acronym “HVD” has also now been adopted in public citations used by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Department of Defense (DoD). See, for example, Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), “Summary of the High-Value Terrorist Detainee Program”, 6 September 2006, available at: http:// www.defenselink.mil/pdf/thehighvaluedetaineeprogram2.pdf. 21. Michael Scheuer, former Chief of the Bin Laden Unit in the CIA’s Counter-Terrorism Center, interview carried out by the rapporteur’s representative in Washington DC, May 2006. Scheuer told us: “We had built up dossiers on all the important people in al-Qaeda within six months after we started the rendition programme. So it was just a matter of keeping those files updated. The approval of the senior levels of the government and the lawyers’ approval, if you pushed them, could be gotten very quickly because everything was ready.” 22. For my comprehensive account of “The evolution of the rendition programme”, including its legal and operational considerations, see the Marty report 2006, supra note 6. 14