Destroying evidence of their crimes
The bombshell du jour should come as no surprise to anyone:
The CIA made videotapes in 2002 of its officers administering harsh interrogation techniques to two al-Qaeda suspects but destroyed the tapes three years later, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.
[...]
All the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 on the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the CIA's director of clandestine operations, officials said. The destruction came after the Justice Department had told a federal judge in the case of al-Qaeda operative Zacarias Moussaoui that the CIA did not possess videotapes of a specific set of interrogations sought by his attorneys.
As part of the CIA's cover-up of its crimes, we're supposed to believe this:
A CIA spokesman said yesterday that the request would not have covered the destroyed tapes.
The real howler is this:
In a note to agency employees yesterday, Hayden said that the decision to destroy the videotapes was made to protect the identities of CIA officers who were clearly identifiable on them.
"Beyond their lack of intelligence value -- as the interrogation sessions had already been exhaustively detailed in written channels -- and the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them, the tapes posed a security risk," Hayden said. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them to and their families to retaliation from al-Qaeda and it sympathizers."
Baloney. If CIA officials were identifiable in the tapes, the agency could have simply kept the tapes locked away in their vaults and maintained their classified status. The CIA Director's suggestion that his agency cannot prevent highly classified material from leaking is patently ludicrous. Instead, it's obvious that the real fear on the part of the agency is that an Inspector General, or a member of Congress, or a future White House staffer with appropriate clearance would have access to proof of the CIA's crimes. This destruction of evidence is simply another example of the rogue lawlessness infecting our intelligence services, all under the name of fighting terrorism.
Jameel Jaffer, an attorney for the ACLU, had this to say:
"The CIA appears to have deliberately destroyed evidence that would have allowed its agents to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners," Jaffer said. "They are tapes that should have been released to the courts and Congress, but the CIA apparently believes that its agents are above the law."
Of course that's what they believe, since that's what the White House keeps telling them.