Congressional Democrats are calling for a full investigation after Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden confirmed on Thursday that in 2005 the CIA destroyed video tapes of its officers using ‘aggressive’ interrogation techniques on al Qaeda prisoners in 2002 – tapes the agency failed to provide to the 9/11 Commission and attorneys representing a terror suspect linked to the 9/11 attacks.
“The 9/11 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 Zelikow, who served as executive director of the 9/11 Commission. “No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings.”
General Hayden said the tapes had no intelligence value and were destroyed to protect CIA officers and their families from retribution by terrorists.
“Beyond their lack of intelligence value … and the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them, the tapes posed a security risk,” General Hayden said in a statement to CIA employees. “Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them to and their families to retaliation from al Qaeda and it sympathizers.”
Critics dismiss this explanation as not credible, and say it is more likely that the CIA destroyed evidence that might prove its officers engaged in criminal activity.
“Millions of documents in CIA archives, if leaked, would identify CIA officers,” said Tom Malinowski, the Washington director of Human Rights Watch. “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.”
Jameel Jaffer, a national security lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, agreed. “The CIA appears to have deliberately destroyed evidence that would have allowed its agents to be held accountable for the torture of prisoners,” he said.
There are also concerns that destruction of the tapes amounts to additional criminal offenses including tampering with evidence and obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations.
However, General Hayden insists that destroying the tapes was done “within the law” and further claims that the House and Senate intelligence committees were fully briefed of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s decision to destroy them.
This has been denied by members of the oversight committees.
Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who chaired the House Intelligence Committee during 2004-2006, said he was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed”. He added that he “absolutely believes that the full committee should have been informed and consulted before the CIA did anything with the tapes.”
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), the committee’s top Democrat at the time and now head of the Homeland Security subcommittee on intelligence and terrorism risk assessment, has called for a full investigation.
Democratic whip Richard Durbin of Illinois has written to new Attorney General Michael Mukasey to ask for an inquiry into “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.”
On the Senate floor on Friday, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) accused the CIA of a cover up and said, “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 18½ -minute gap on the tapes of Richard Nixon.”
