CIA destroyed terrorism suspect videotapes

cpawfan · Dec 7, 2007

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22139312/



<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE </div><div class='quotemain'>The CIA destroyed videotapes it made in 2002 of the interrogations of two top terror suspects because it was afraid that keeping them "posed a security risk," Director Michael Hayden told agency employees.
Current and former intelligence officials told NBC News' Robert Windrem that one of the videos included the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah, the person in charge of al-Qaida's training camps and the group's first major leader to be captured.
Hayden's revelation to the CIA employees caused a commotion on Capitol Hill where members of the Senate Intelligence Committee immediately vowed to conduct a thorough review. A leading human rights group voiced alarm about it.
In his message to agency workers, Hayden said that House of Representatives and Senate intelligence committee leaders had been informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them to protect the identities of the questioners. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were legal. Hayden said the tapes were destroyed three years after the 2002 interrogations.
Jane Harman, then the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes' existence and the CIA's intention to ultimately destroy them.
'Bad idea'
"I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it," Harman said. While key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA's intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency actually carried out the plan. The Senate Intelligence Committee's Democratic chairman, Jay Rockefeller, said the committee only learned of the tapes' destruction in November 2006.
Republican Pete Hoekstra, who was chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from August 2004 until the end of 2006, said through a spokesman that he does not remember being informed of the videotaping program.
"Congressman Hoekstra does not recall ever being told of the existence or destruction of these tapes," said Jamal D. Ware, senior adviser to the committee. "He believes that Director Hayden is being generous in his claim that the committee was informed. He believes the committee should have been fully briefed and consulted on how this was handled."
Jennifer Daskal, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch, said that destroying the tapes was illegal. "Basically this is destruction of evidence," she said, calling Hayden's explanation that the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA identities "disingenuous."
Waterboarding?
In the statement to agency employees, CIA director Hayden revealed that the agency destroyed all copies of the video in 2005. While the official agency statement does not mention waterboarding, officials tell NBC News the videos included the waterboarding of Zubaydah. He was known as al-Qaida's "dean of students" and had an encyclopedic knowledge of al-Qaida operatives worldwide. He is now awaiting trial at the U.S. prison at the Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Zubaydah, under harsh questioning, told CIA interrogators about alleged 9/11 accomplice Ramzi Binalshibh, President Bush said publicly in 2006. Binalshibh was captured and interrogated and, with Zubaydah's information, authorities in 2003 captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Hayden said that a secondary reason for the taped interrogations was to have backup documentation of the information gathered.
"The agency soon determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes. Indeed, videotaping stopped in 2002," Hayden said.
The CIA is known to have waterboarded three prisoners since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, but not since 2003. Hayden banned the use of the procedure in 2006, according to knowledgeable officials.
The disclosure of the tapes' destruction came on the same day the House and Senate intelligence committees agreed to legislation prohibiting the CIA from using "enhanced interrogation techniques." The White House Thursday threatened to veto the bill.
Attempt to get ahead of newspaper
Hayden's message to CIA employees was an attempt to get ahead of a New York Times story about the videotapes, The Associated Press reported.
In the story in the newspaper, members of the Sept. 11 commission said they were surprised the interrogation tapes existed until 2005.
The commission had asked for material of this kind during their investigation that ended in 2004, 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, told the newspaper.
“The commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” he said. “No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings.”
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 al-Qaida leaders, warned “it’s a very big deal” if tapes were destroyed, the New York Times reported.
It could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations, Marcus told the New York Times.
'In line with the law'
Hayden insisted that the CIA's actions were legal.
"What matters here is that it was done in line with the law," he said. "Over the course of its life, the agency's interrogation program has been of great value to our country. It has helped disrupt terrorist operations and save lives. It was built on a solid foundation of legal review. It has been conducted with careful supervision. If the story of these tapes is told fairly, it will underscore those facts."
The CIA says the tapes were destroyed late in 2005, a year marked by increasing pressure from defense attorneys to obtain videotapes of detainee interrogations. The scandal over harsh treatment of detainees at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had focused public attention on interrogation techniques.
Beginning in 2003, attorneys for al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui began seeking videotapes of interrogations they believed might help them show their client was not a part of the Sept. 11 attacks. These requests heated up in 2005 as the defense slowly learned the identities of more detainees in U.S. custody.
In May 2005, U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema ordered the government to disclose whether interrogations were recorded. The government objected to that order, and the judge modified it on Nov. 3, 2005, to ask for confirmation of whether the government "has video or audio tapes of these interrogations" and then named specific ones. Eleven days later, the government denied it had video or audio tapes of those specific interrogations.
Failed to hand-over tapes
Last month, the CIA admitted to Brinkema and a circuit judge that it had failed to hand over tapes of enemy combatant witnesses. Those interrogations were not part of the CIA's detention program and were not conducted or recorded by the agency, the agency said.
"The CIA did not say to the court in its original filing that it had no terrorist tapes at all. It would be wrong to assert that," CIA spokesman George Little said.
The 9/11 Commission referenced the 2002 interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Binalshibh multiple times throughout its report, but cited written documents and audiotapes only.
There is no mention in the letter of the tapes that CIA officials destroyed in 2005, The New York Times reported. Moussaoui was convicted last year and sentenced to life in prison.
John Radsan, who worked as a CIA lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said destroying these tapes could carry legal penalties, according to the newspaper.
“If anybody at the CIA hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he told the New York Times.</div>

cpawfan · Dec 7, 2007

n_windrem_ciavideotapes_071206.vmodv4.jpg

CIA destroyed evidence?</a> Dec. 7: Abu Zubaydah says the only reason he gave up certain information during an interrogation was because he was being tortured, according to transcripts obtained by NBC News. NBC's Bob Windrem reports.

Denny Crane · Dec 7, 2007

There has been a non-stop effort by the CIA (Clinton appointees) to undermine the administration and its efforts in the war on terror.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/13/opinion/...amp;oref=slogin
<h5>November 13, 2004</h5>

<nyt_kicker> OP-ED COLUMNIST </nyt_kicker> <nyt_headline type=" " version="1.0"> </nyt_headline>
<h2>The C.I.A. Versus Bush</h2>

<nyt_byline type=" " version="1.0"> By DAVID BROOKS
</nyt_byline>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="right">
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<td></td>
</tr>
</tbody>
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<nyt_text> </nyt_text>

ow that he's been returned to office, <alt-code value="Bush, George W" idsrc="nyt-per-pol">President Bush is going to have to differentiate between his opponents and his enemies. His opponents are found in the Democratic Party. His enemies are in certain offices of the Central Intelligence Agency.</alt-code>

Over the past several months, as much of official Washington looked on wide-eyed and agog, many in the C.I.A. bureaucracy have waged an unabashed effort to undermine the current administration.

At the height of the campaign, C.I.A. officials, who are supposed to serve the president and stay out of politics and policy, served up leak after leak to discredit the president's Iraq policy. There were leaks of prewar intelligence estimates, leaks of interagency memos. In mid-September, somebody leaked a C.I.A. report predicting a gloomy or apocalyptic future for the region. Later that month, a senior C.I.A. official, Paul Pillar, reportedly made comments saying he had long felt the decision to go to war would heighten anti-American animosity in the Arab world.

White House officials concluded that they could no longer share important arguments and information with intelligence officials. They had to parse every syllable in internal e-mail. One White House official says it felt as if the C.I.A. had turned over its internal wastebaskets and fed every shred of paper to the press.

The White House-C.I.A. relationship became dysfunctional, and while the blame was certainly not all on one side, Langley was engaged in slow-motion, brazen insubordination, which violated all standards of honorable public service. It was also incredibly stupid, since C.I.A. officials were betting their agency on a Kerry victory.

As the presidential race heated up, the C.I.A. permitted an analyst - who, we now know, is Michael Scheuer - to publish anonymously a book called "Imperial Hubris," which criticized the Iraq war. Here was an official on the president's payroll publicly campaigning against his boss. As Scheuer told The Washington Post this week, "As long as the book was being used to bash the president, they [the C.I.A. honchos] gave me carte blanche to talk to the media."

Nor is this feud over. C.I.A. officials are now busy undermining their new boss, Porter Goss. One senior official called one of Goss's deputies, who worked on Capitol Hill, a "Hill Puke," and said he didn't have to listen to anything the deputy said. Is this any way to run a superpower?

Meanwhile, members of Congress and people around the executive branch are wondering what President Bush is going to do to punish the mutineers. A president simply cannot allow a department or agency to go into campaign season opposition and then pay no price for it. If that happens, employees of every agency will feel free to go off and start their own little media campaigns whenever their hearts desire.

If we lived in a primitive age, the ground at Langley would be laid waste and salted, and there would be heads on spikes. As it is, the answer to the C.I.A. insubordination is not just to move a few boxes on the office flow chart.

The answer is to define carefully what the president expects from the intelligence community: information. Policy making is not the C.I.A.'s concern. It is time to reassert some harsh authority so C.I.A. employees know they must defer to the people who win elections, so they do not feel free at meetings to spout off about their contempt of the White House, so they do not go around to their counterparts from other nations and tell them to ignore American policy.

In short, people in the C.I.A. need to be reminded that the person the president sends to run their agency is going to run their agency, and that if they ever want their information to be trusted, they can't break the law with self-serving leaks of classified data.

This is about more than intelligence. It's about Bush's second term. Is the president going to be able to rely on the institutions of government to execute his policies, or, by his laxity, will he permit the bureaucracy to ignore, evade and subvert the decisions made at the top? If the C.I.A. pays no price for its behavior, no one will pay a price for anything, and everything is permitted. That, Mr. President, is a slam-dunk.

Not that it will do him much good at this point, but I owe <alt-code value="Kerry, John F" idsrc="nyt-per-pol">John Kerry an apology. I recently mischaracterized some comments he made to Larry King in December 2001. I said he had embraced the decision to use Afghans to hunt down Al Qaeda at Tora Bora. He did not. I regret the error. </alt-code>

Denny Crane · Dec 7, 2007

Regarding the issue of torture, I'm all for it in a very few cases. Doing so for the basic purpose of gaining intel/information is obviously not a good thing or idea. Doing so to gain intel/information that saves civilian lives or the lives of our troops is a good thing and a good idea. It also depends on who it is that is being interrogated. Abu Zubaydah is fair game, a typical Iraqi arrested on the street under suspicion (but not certain) of being an insurgent is not fair game. In rare circumstances, I'd favor extreme measures of interrogation in the USA even - like if it means finding where some child molester has buried a child alive before it's too late.

Some make the argument that if we don't live up to the Geneva Conventions standards for POW and detainee treatment (e.g. no torture) that enemies who capture US troops and civilians won't live up to those standards either. That argument just doesn't hold water - I cannot think of a war in the last 150 years that we've been involved in (including the civil war) where our troops and/or civilians were treated to those standards. John McCain is a perfect case in point about how the Hanoi Hilton was a place of torture by our enemies in the Vietnam War, and it's not easy to forget the videos our current enemies produce of things like beheadings. Or the videos of our soldiers' bodies being dragged through the streets in Somila. Waterboarding simply pales in comparison.

I am not suggesting at all that the use of extreme forms of interrogation should be frequent or common - far from it. I am suggesting that it's a brutal world out there and to not play the game by the same rules our enemies play it puts us in a horrible situation. It's akin to the British soldiers wearing their red coats in the woods (highly visible) against a foe (revolutionary army) who used guerilla tactics which were not the (then) accepted practice for waging battles.

Thoth · Dec 7, 2007

I wonder (somewhat tongue in cheek) is; the CIA copying the NFL or vice versa?

CelticKing · Dec 7, 2007

Whats wrong with destroying the tapes?

As for torturing, in a perfect world it shouldn't happen, but we're not in one so its fair game I guess. Anything to protect our country. Mistakes will happen but I'll take that over 9/11 any day.

Denny Crane · Dec 7, 2007

Yeah, in spite of it all, it's pretty remarkable, in a historical context, the fine line the administration has walked between civil liberties and activities that wouldn't have been conceivable before 9/11.

Consider that our founding fathers enacted the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 which were harsh and severe; the Sedition Act in particular made it possible for the govt. to throw people in jail for speaking out against public officials. Lincoln suspended Habeus Corpus entirely during the Civil War. FDR was hardly a friend to civil liberties during WW II with the infamous Sedition Trials of 1944, the internment of 100,000+ Japanese-Americans, and military tribunals. The Truman administration threatened scientists and journalists with both sedition charges and physical injury through covert means during the Korean War. LBJ used federal agencies and the army inteligence services to spy on war protesters during Vietnam. Nixon was pretty much more of the same (and worse).

The government really does circle the wagons in threatening and dangerous times, and post-9/11 isn't different in that regard. This administration has arrested 5,000 or so people, most have been released after relatively short time. The NY Times, Democrats, and even many of the president's own party have freely published their anti-war positions in our most popular newspapers and television outlets. The NY Times has even published stories about top secret national security programs (ones that the Democrat controlled congress have sanctioned after the fact). Hundreds of combatants captured on the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan have been held without legal status and rights for several years now.

In comparison to past things the govt. has done in the name of protecting the nation and fighting wars, I'm seeing a much more minimal intrusion on the basic rights of people and those intrusions are affecting far fewer this time around than any time in the past.

This is not to say the administration is blameless or completely innocent. Abu Grahib was both a debacle and inconscionable; we should have burned that place to the ground immediately after ousting Saddam as a show of our good intentions. The administration has clearly skirted the laws and by executive order - though consulting with a small number of senators and house members of both parties. In spite of spending our blood and treasure and generally surpassing the standards set by the Geneva Conventions and other international treaties, the results in Iraq (in terms of civilian casualties, mass migration of peoples, and the general welfare of the people and nation) have been unacceptable until recently. The administration's diplomatic efforts have largely been failures. And so on.

The powers of the office of the president have been something of a pendulum. FDR clearly had authoritarian levels of power that were downright near fascist. He tried to stack the supreme court to further cement that power, and basically turned most of the nation's manufacturing power into a war machine. He subverted the press and hollywood for propaganda purposes as well as putting a heroic face on Stalinist Russia (our allies, after all). Nixon's numerous abuses of power led to a highly weakened office of the president (Ford and Carter years in particular). The pendulum swung the other way during the Reagan years, and grew in spite of Iran-Contra. Clinton's presidency was particularly strong, and Bush's now is the strongest since FDR's time.

I would point out that Clinton abused his powers in numerous ways. He traded US military bases to the Chinese in exchange for campaign contributions, used FBI files to build an enemies database within his "war room" and "bimbo squad" organizations. He traded pardons for campaign contributions and contributions to his library. He rented out the Lincoln Bedroom for political faors. These things were for his personal and political benefit, which to me is worse than doing similar things for national security reasons.

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