Today’s Must ReadUsually, what nails you in Washington malfeasance is the cover-up, not the crime. With the revelation that the CIA in 2005 destroyed videotapes of interrogations of senior al-Qaeda detainees, it’ll be both.
Start with the facts as they’re currently understood. In 2002, the CIA videotaped interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, the chief of al-Qaeda’s military committee, and an as-yet-unknown colleague. (My guess is that Detainee #2 is Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who, following his capture that September in Pakistan, was the second most important detainee then in custody.) During that time, the tapes remained a closely-held secret, despite requests for information on interrogations from the 9/11 Commission, a 2002 joint Congressional inquiry into 9/11, and Judge Leonie Brinkema, who presided over the Zacharias Moussaoui trial. In 2005, then operations chief Jose Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed, without disclosing their existence to anyone who didn’t already know. This week, The New York Times prepared a story about the tapes. To get out in front of it, Director Michael Hayden released a statement about both the tapes and their destruction.
Hayden makes not a single plausible claim about the tapes and why they were destroyed. He said in an internal message to CIA employees that the release of the tapes — whether to the judge or to the inquiries or to, ultimately, the press — would have allowed al-Qaeda to identify CIA interrogators and then target them for retribution. The appropriate response to that is: LOL. The CIA has the capacity to move its operatives around the world, including to places where there aren’t any al-Qaeda “assassins” — like, say, northern Virginia. To say otherwise, as Hayden does, is to tacitly concede that CIA is too incompetent to protect its people.
Hayden said that the tapes in 2005 “were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries.” First, that ducks the question of why they weren’t relevant to, say, the joint Congressional inquiry or the 9/11 Commission, which they obviously were. Second, Moussaoui was convicted in 2006. The tapes were clearly relevant to his case, as Moussaoui wanted Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation entered into the record for his defense (bin al-Shibh’s, too). The Justice Department told Judge Brinkema that the interrogation wasn’t videotaped. Someone at CIA either lied to DOJ (likely) or someone at DOJ lied to Brinkema (less likely). Third, Congress has been trying to get information about CIA interrogations for years. These are obviously relevant to that “legislative inquiry” as well.
He also said that the CIA’s general counsel — who works for the agency’s director — said the destruction was kosher, while neglecting to say whether his persecuted inspector general ever rendered a judgment here.
Of course, Hayden just inherited this whirlwind. His predecessors, George Tenet and Porter Goss, sowed it. And to a greater degree, it’s the fault of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, John Yoo and John Rizzo, who created a blatantly illegal interrogation program for the CIA to implement. Those on the tapes torturing Abu Zubaydah and Detainee #2 were, loyally, doing what those men wanted. But Tenet must have known that what’s on those tapes is evidence of criminal activity. That’s a much more plausible explanation for why he stopped taping interrogations. And it’s also probably why Rodriguez, with Goss’ tacit or explicit consent, destroyed them. If Michael Mukasey is the same man of integrity he was before he became attorney general, he’d call that criminal conspiracy or deliberate obstruction of justice.
What will probably end up consuming the remainder of Bush’s term is an inquiry into the cover-up. But it’s always the crime — torture, systematic and approved by the highest levels — that demands focus. And it was the CIA’s decision to distract whomever it could from knowing about the crime.