The CIA destroyed videotapes of suspected terrorists being subjected to waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques, The New York Times reported last week. The tapes, shot in 2002, contained footage of high-ranking al Qaida operative Abu Zuba
The CIA destroyed videotapes of suspected terrorists being subjected to waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques, The New York Times reported last week. The tapes, shot in 2002, contained footage of high-ranking al Qaida operative Abu Zubaydah and at least one other detainee. They were destroyed in 2005, CIA Director Michael Hayden confirmed, at a time when the CIA’s use of what it called “enhanced interrogation techniques” was under intense scrutiny. “The possibility of obstruction of justice is very real,” said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Justice Department and House and Senate intelligence committees launched investigations.
The decision to erase the tapes was made independently by a senior CIA official and was “in line with the law,” said Hayden. The tapes were destroyed, he said, because they could have led to the disclosure of the identities of the CIA interrogators if they had become public. Before the tapes were destroyed, both the 9/11 Commission and a federal court had formally petitioned the CIA to provide all documentation of its interrogations. “No tapes were acknowledged or turned over,” said 9/11 Commission Executive Director Philip Zelikow.
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
This travesty proves that the Bush administration knew all along that “enhanced interrogation” is actually torture, said The Philadelphia Inquirer. For all their top-secret legal justifications for these barbaric practices, officials “knew the court of public opinion and international law would never sanction them.” Now Attorney General Michael Mukasey, who still claims he doesn’t know if waterboarding is torture, says his Justice Department is capable of investigating the destruction of evidence. Thanks, but we’ll side with the Democrats calling for an independent prosecutor.
The Democrats’ indignation would be a lot more convincing if they hadn’t approved these interrogations in the first place, said The Wall Street Journal. The CIA briefed Nancy Pelosi and other top Democrats on waterboarding and enhanced interrogation back when Americans were terrified about another 9/11-style attack and the political climate was different. “The reaction in the room was not just approval but encouragement,” said former CIA director Porter Goss. Now that the political climate has changed, spineless Democrats are pretending to be “shocked and appalled” by the very idea of waterboarding.
What the columnists said
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
The tapes were destroyed for a very obvious reason, said Andrew Sullivan in TheAtlantic.com. They could prove that “we have a war criminal in the Oval Office.” Retired CIA agent John Kiriakou, who led the interrogation of Zubaydah, said the orders to subject him to waterboarding were approved by the White House. The CIA claims that waterboarding compelled Zubaydah to give up information about numerous al Qaida operatives and plots, but other intelligence agents have said Zubaydah was a babbling lunatic and that most of what he “revealed” was imaginary.
The Bush administration couldn’t have gotten away with this without its Democratic enablers, said Glenn Greenwald in Salon.com. Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee are now whining that they were “virtually helpless to respond,” but what is the point, then, of briefing them? “They are supposed to do something when they learn that the president and the CIA are breaking the law.”
Think how different everything would be if the tapes hadn’t been destroyed, said Emily Bazelon and Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com. A videotape of a babbling Zubaydah begging for mercy on the waterboard would, if leaked, have repulsed Americans the same way the Abu Ghraib photos did. “The tapes would have made their point graphically, indisputably, unforgettably.” There would not have been any debate over whether waterboarding is torture, and public opinion would have quickly turned against “the government’s legal assault on the rule of law in recent years, from free and open trials, to secret expansions of executive powers.” No wonder “this evidence was deliberately obliterated.”
What next?
The CIA and White House said they would fully cooperate with the various investigations, amid signs that there are a lot of nervous officials at both institutions. The CIA’s senior lawyer, John Rizzo, was reported to be furious that the tapes were destroyed without his knowledge or consent. At the White House, spokeswoman Dana Perino said President Bush “had no recollection” of being told about the tapes’ existence or the decision to destroy them. On orders of White House counsel Fred Fielding, she said, there would be no further public statements on the subject by any White House official.
