http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/005082.phpWe've heard CIA Director Michael Hayden's confusing and risible explanation for why the CIA's torture tapes were destroyed. And there have been a number of media accounts citing dozens of unanimous government officials that haven't managed to shed much light. But today's Washington Post provides about as clear of a narrative as we're likely to get on why the tapes were made, when they were made, and why they were destroyed.
Here's what they came up with: "the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee's death." CIA officials have also said that videotapes of the interrogations would have been very useful for reviewing what the detainees had said.
And here's why they were destroyed, according to the Post. The Post broke news of the CIA's black sites in November of 2005. That made CIA officials even more nervous that "the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry." At the same time, the station chief in Bangkok, who'd had the tapes in a safe in the U.S. Embassy compound there for three years, was retiring and "wanted to resolve the matter before he left." So he sent a cable to CIA headquarters asking if he could destroy them.
The rest we know. Then-operations chief Jose Rodriguez checked with two CIA lawyers who said that the agency was not required to preserve them. Since no one in the administration had directly forbidden the destruction of the tapes, he went ahead and gave the station chief the go-ahead.
And no one seemed to be very upset after the deed was done: "Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men."
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