Paul Kiel December 12, 2007, 10:47 AM

Here’s another data point for the timeline. From the AP: “The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.” But the CIA has an “out”: the videotapes and the detainees were being held at the CIA’s black sites, which were not revealed until November of 2005.

Consider the timeline.

In June of 2005, the AP reports, “U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”

But both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the Al-Qaeda members whose brutal interrogations were videotaped in 2002, were being held by the CIA overseas. The tapes, which were also kept overseas, were reportedly destroyed the same month The Washington Post broke the black sites story, November of 2005. In September of 2006, President Bush announced that fourteen high value detainees were being transferred to Guantanamo Bay; both Zubaydah and Nashiri were among them.

That may mean that the tapes were “beyond the scope of the court’s order,” the AP reports, adding “CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.” Neat trick.

CIA Tapes, Torture