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CIA Director John Deutch and his top assistant, Nora Slatkin. The pair ran Clinton's CIA in the mid-1990s and implemented a "human rights scrub" policy.

"Deutch and Nora, Clinton's anti-intelligence plants, implemented a universal 'human rights scrub' of all assets, virtually shutting down operations for 6 months to a year. This was after something happened in Central America (there was an American woman involved who was the common law wife of a commie who went missing there) that got a lot of bad press for the agency. "After that, each asset had to be certified as being 'clean for human rights violations.' "What this did was to put off limits, in effect, terrorists, criminals, and anyone else who would have info on these kinds of people." Roger says the CIA, even under new leadership, has never recovered from the "Human Rights Scrub" policy.

"Roger," was a CIA spy in the Mideast.

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Wednesday Sept. 13, 2001; 12:02 a.m. EDT

A former CIA official said late Wednesday that U.S. spy recruitment had been decimated by strict Clinton administration rules that tied the agency's hands in its war against terrorism.

"We don't have enough people on the ground in the right places," former Iraqi bureau station chief Whitney Bruner told Fox News Channel's Bill O'Reilly.

"Partly it's because there's a culture that I think has developed in Washington concerning human operations over the last several years," Bruner said; a policy that limited the kind of people the agency could deal with.

"When you're dealing with a terrorist target you are dealing with what might charitably be called slimeballs - very, very unpleasant type people who probably have criminal records," the former station chief explained.

But the people in a position to know about terrorists' plans were off limits under Clinton-era CIA regulations.

"We're not allowed to deal with them ... if the person you are trying to recruit against a terrorist target has questions of human rights or other kinds of crime," Bruner revealed.