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THE PROGRESSIVE REVIEW - December 10, 2007
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CIA Destroyed Two Tapes Showing Interrogations
By Mark Mazzetti
The New York Times
Washington - The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005
destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the
interrogation of two Qaeda operatives in the agency's
custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional
and legal scrutiny about its secret detention program,
according to current and former government officials.
The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subject-
ing terrorism suspects - including Abu Zubaydah, the first
detainee in C.I.A. custody - to severe interrogation
techniques. The tapes were destroyed in part because
officers were concerned that video showing harsh
interrogation methods could expose agency officials to
legal risks, several officials said.
In a statement to employees on Thursday, Gen. Michael V.
Hayden, the C.I.A. director, said that the decision to
destroy the tapes was made "within the C.I.A." and that
they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover
officers and because they no longer had intelligence
value.
The destruction of the tapes raises questions about whether
agency officials withheld information from Congress, the
courts and the Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the
program.
The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing
the case of the terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to
the Sept. 11 commission, which was appointed by President
Bush and Congress, and which had made formal requests to
the C.I.A. for transcripts and other documentary evidence
taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
The disclosures about the tapes are likely to reignite the
debate over laws that allow the C.I.A. to use interrogation
practices more severe than those allowed to other agencies.
A Congressional conference committee voted late Wednesday
to outlaw those interrogation practices, but the measure
has yet to pass the full House and Senate and is likely to
face a veto from Mr. Bush.
The New York Times informed the intelligence agency on
Wednesday evening that it was preparing to publish an
article about the destruction of the tapes. In his state-
ment to employees on Thursday, General Hayden said that
the agency had acted "in line with the law" and that he
was informing C.I.A. employees "because the press has
learned" about the matter.
General Hayden's statement said that the tapes posed a
"serious security risk" and that if they had become public
they would have exposed C.I.A. officials "and their
families to retaliation from Al Qaeda and its sympathizers."
Current and former intelligence officials said that the
decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose A. Rodriguez
Jr., who was the head of the Directorate of Operations, the
agency's clandestine service. Mr. Rodriguez could not be
reached Thursday for comment.
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Two former intelligence officials said that Porter J. Goss,
the director of the agency at the time, was not told that
the tapes would be destroyed and was angered to learn that
they had been.
Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined to comment on the
matter.
In his statement, General Hayden said leaders of Congress-
ional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the
existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision
to destroy them. But the two top members of the House
Intelligence Committee in 2005 said Thursday that they had
not been notified in advance of the decision to destroy
the tapes.
A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican
of Michigan, who was the committee's chairman between 2004
and 2006, said that Mr. Hoekstra was "never briefed or
advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going
to be destroyed."
The spokesman, Jamal Ware, also said that Mr. Hoekstra
"absolutely believes that the full committee should have
been informed and consulted before the C.I.A. did anything
with the tapes."
Representative Jane Harman of California, the top Democrat
on the committee between 2002 and 2006, said that she told
C.I.A. officials several years ago that destroying any
interrogation tapes would be a "bad idea."
"How in the world could the C.I.A. claim that these tapes
were not relevant to a legislative inquiry?" she said.
"This episode reinforces my view that the C.I.A. should
not be conducting a separate interrogations program."
In both 2003 and 2005 C.I.A. lawyers told prosecutors in
the Moussaoui case that the C.I.A. did not possess record-
ings of interrogations sought by the judge. Mr. Moussaoui's
lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might
provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui, showing
that the Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and
clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said that the court
had sought tapes of "specific, named terrorists whose
comments might have a bearing on the Moussaoui case"
and that the videotapes destroyed were not of those
individuals. Intelligence officials identified Abu Zubaydah
as one of the detainees whose interrogation tape was
destroyed, but the other detainee's name was not disclosed.
General Hayden has said publicly that information obtained
through the C.I.A.'s detention and interrogation program
has been the best source of intelligence for operations
against Al Qaeda. In a speech last year, President Bush
said that information from Mr. Zubaydah had helped lead to
the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the master-
mind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed
its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told
that interrogation videotapes had existed until 2005.
"The commission did formally request material of this kind
from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured
that we had received all the material responsive to our
request," said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive
director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior
counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the
commission provided with any transcript prepared from
recordings," he said.
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Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who
served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and
was involved in the discussions about interviews with Qaeda
leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being
destroyed.
If tapes were destroyed, he said, "it's a big deal, it's a
very big deal," because it could amount to obstruction of
justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or
fact-finding investigations.
Mr. Gimigliano, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency
"went to great lengths to meet the requests of the 9/11
commission," and that the C.I.A. had preserved the tapes
until the commission ended its work in case members
requested the tapes.
Several current and former intelligence officials were
interviewed for this article over a period of several
weeks. All requested anonymity because information about
the tapes had been classified until General Hayden issued
his statement on Thursday acknowledging that they had been
destroyed.
The C.I.A. program that included the detention and
interrogation of terrorism suspects began after the
capture of Mr. Zubaydah in March 2002. The C.I.A. has
said that the Justice Department and other elements of
the executive branch reviewed and approved the use of
a set of harsh techniques before they were used on any
prisoners, and that the Justice Department issued a
classified legal opinion in August 2002 that provided
explicit authorization for their use.
Some members of Congress have since sought to ban some of
the techniques, saying that they amounted to torture, which
is prohibited under American law. But President Bush, who
revealed the existence of the C.I.A. program in September
2006, has defended the techniques as legal, and has said
they have proven beneficial in obtaining critical
intelligence information.
Some of the harshest techniques, including waterboarding,
which induces a feeling of drowning and near-suffocation,
were used on several of the first Qaeda operatives captured
by the C.I.A., including Abu Zubaydah. But intelligence
officials have said that waterboarding is no longer on an
approved list spelled out in a classified executive order
that was issued by the White House this year.
In his statement, General Hayden said the tapes were
originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in
accordance with "established legal and policy guidelines."
He said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in
2002.
"The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal
check on the program in its early stages," he said. He
said they were destroyed only after the agency's Office of
the General Counsel and Office of the Inspector General
had examined them and determined that they showed lawful
methods of questioning.
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Tom Malinowski, Washington director of Human Rights Watch,
said General Hayden's claim that the tapes were destroyed
to protect C.I.A. officers "is not credible."
"Millions of documents in C.I.A. archives, if leaked, would
identify C.I.A. officers," Mr. Malinowski said. "The only
difference here is that these tapes portray potentially
criminal activity. They must have understood that if people
saw these tapes, they would consider them to show acts of
torture, which is a felony offense."
It has been widely reported that Abu Zubaydah was subjected
to several tough physical tactics. But the current and
former intelligence officials who described the decision
to destroy the videotapes said that C.I.A. officers had
judged that the release of photos or videos depicting his
interrogation would provoke a strong reaction.
In exchanges involving the Moussaoui case, the C.I.A.
notified the United States attorney's office in Alexandria,
Va., in September that it had discovered two videotapes and
one audio tape that it had not previously acknowledged to
the court, but made no mention of any tapes destroyed in
2005.
The acknowledgment was spelled out in a letter sent in
October by federal prosecutors that amended the C.I.A.'s
previous declarations involving videotapes. The letter is
heavily redacted, with sentences identifying the detainees
blacked out.
Signed by the United States attorney, Chuck Rosenberg, the
letter states that the C.I.A.'s search for interrogation
tapes "appears to be complete."
Mr. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life
in prison.
Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, a Democratic member
of the House Intelligence Committee, has been pushing
legislation in Congress to have all detainee interrogations
videotaped so officials can refer to the tapes multiple
times to glean better information.
Mr. Holt said he had been told many times that the C.I.A.
did not record the interrogation of detainees. "When I
would ask them whether they had reviewed the tapes to
better understand the intelligence, they said, 'What
tapes?'," he said.
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Eric Lichtblau and Scott Shane contributed reporting.
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