Webloggin » Keystone Oversight and the CIA Obstructionist Model of Dishonesty

The left is up in arms today, and rightfully so, about a New York Times revelation that the CIA destroyed 2 videotapes that showed the waterboarding interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and another al Qaeda operative while in agency custody.

WASHINGTON, Dec. 6 — The Central Intelligence Agency in 2005 destroyed at least two videotapes documenting the interrogation of two Al Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody, a step it took in the midst of Congressional and legal scrutiny about the C.I.A’s secret detention program, according to current and former government officials.

The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques. They were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy, several officials said.

The C.I.A. said today that the decision to destroy the tapes had been made “within the C.I.A. itself,” and they were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value. The agency was headed at the time by Porter J. Goss. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Goss declined this afternoon to comment on the destruction of the tapes.

What we have here is a perfect example that the government is fully out of control on all ends. This is not only stupid it is downright illegal. Worse however is the fact that this incident exposes gross misconduct and documents a general aura of deceit to cover up potential criminal behavior by all involved.

A 30,000 foot level perspective shows the following:

The CIA destroyed evidence that was requested by numerous criminal investigators, lawyers for detainee terror suspects, members of Congress who serve posts on key intelligence committees and even the 9-11 commission. Yet the CIA repeatedly denied their existence.
The CIA, supposedly one of the worlds premiere intelligence agencies, seems inept at best when it comes to hiding secrets. The agency is consistently the source or the target of leaked intelligence reports that eventually makes their way to left leaning papers such as the New York Times. This is a widespread problem for the government, one that seems to be hemorrhaging at the seams every bit as much as the truthfulness of the public servants working for the American people.
The excuse that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of interrogators and their family from al Qaeda is a tacit admission from the CIA that they can not even trust themselves to protect the identity of people acting under orders from the top. This paints the agency once again as inept and it leads one to believe that those at the top are willfully acting in a criminally negligent manner.
One key admission here however is that of the role of certain people in congress who knew of both the existence of the tapes AND the plan to destroy them. Yet they did nothing and said nothing, not to the public and not even to other members of Congress until now! Suddenly they are venting supposed outrage. Well I’m not buying it. Every one of these people need to answer for this. Getting kicked out of congress is not enough if found complicit. People need to start being held responsible. There are people on both sides of the aisle who knew of the existence of the tapes, specifically Senate intelligence committee chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) who was the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee at the time, Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL) and Sen. Pat Roberts (R-KS)

Key outtakes from the NY Times are as follows:

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.

[~snip]

In both 2003 and 2005 C.I.A. lawyers told prosecutors in the Moussaoui case that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings 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.

In other words the lawyers for Moussaoui will likely be granted a new trial. Thanks for nothing. But hey, it’s just your tax dollars and the U.S. credibility on the line here.

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.

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.

“Serious security risk” may have been acceptable if the government said the tapes would be censored to hide the identity of the personnel but all of that flies out the window with their destruction. Who can believe Hayden now? But al least Hayden briefed members of Congress; all of whom played stupid.

In his statement, General Hayden said leaders of Congressional 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.

You can’t blame the CIA for not telling a wider audience. Even so, the statement that two top members were not briefed before they were destroyed reeks of a CYA attempt after the fact. It stretches imagination to say something so deceitful as demonstrated below.

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.”

So let me get this straight, Harman knew of the tapes AND knew that they were eventually going to be destroyed but is now upset that the CIA didn’t give her a ring two years later on the eve of destruction? If Harman was so vested in preserving these tapes she should have done something about preserving them back then.

TPM Muckracker gets it right here.

But the bottom line here is that at least some Congressional leaders knew something about the tapes and something about their destruction, and didn’t say anything about either. Harman’s silence is especially stunning: she co-chaired a joint Congressional inquiry into the 9/11 attacks in 2002 that didn’t receive that very pertinent information. Why did she remain quiet about potentially criminal behavior?

The legality of waterboarding was very much up in the air at the time of these requests. Thus the existence of these tapes is entirely relevant when put in a proper perspective. Yet members of Congress and members of U.S. intelligence agencies took it upon themselves to lie, coverup and eventually destroy evidence in a case that has wide ranging implications for U.S. security and the war on terror.

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