The CIA and torture videos
By any basic definition of criminal obstruction of justice, the CIA did just that in 2005 by destroying videotapes made in its secret prisons of what the president approvingly calls “coerced interrogations.” Thereby the CIA defied orders by federal judges and the 9/11 Commission to keep intact all records of interrogations of detainees.
This internationally criticized removal of hard evidence of CIA tortures is supposedly under official investigation by the Justice Department in partnership with the CIA. There is also a second investigation by committees of Congress. But the latter was at first limited by Attorney General Michael Mukasey’s refusal to turn over to Congress records and witnesses of possible Justice Department involvement.
Now that Mukasey has apparently relented, Democratic Sen. Joe Biden is right in calling for a special counsel because both these investigations lack credibility. For instance, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel — in its 2002 “torture memos” — allowed the CIA to engage in such practices as waterboarding (shown in these vanished CIA tapes).
Those 2002 permissions were withdrawn the following year but secretly reinstituted by the Justice Department in 2005. And in a classified executive order in July 2006, the president, without objection from the Justice Department, has allowed CIA’s secret prisons to remain open, and we don’t know what’s going on in them.
Whether an independent special prosecutor will be appointed, with a credibility the CIA and Congress do not have, depends on Mukasey, who is strongly disinclined to bring in a special counsel.
In any case, Democratic Sen. Richard Durbin of Illinois has opened another important dimension of discovering other documentation of the CIA’s violations of our own antitorture statute and corollary international treaties we have signed. Writing to Mukasey on Dec. 12, Durbin points out that:
“According to (the) Chicago Tribune, the interrogation of a detainee who was allegedly rendered to Egypt by the CIA may have been recorded.” These CIA kidnapping “renditions” to a number of countries known to torture prisoners have been widely documented by human rights organizations and the press (both in this country and abroad).
Therefore, Durbin’s letter to the attorney general continues: “This raises questions whether Egypt or other countries to which the CIA has rendered detainees have made video or audio recordings of these detainees being interrogated — and whether such recordings have been destroyed by or at the request of the CIA.”
A similar letter was sent by Durbin on Dec. 12 to Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, also asking whether other countries to which the CIA has rendered prisoners have recordings of the special interrogation techniques that were used on them.
Durbin asks Hayden a fair question: “Indeed, if the CIA renders a detainee to a foreign country for the purpose of interrogation, it seems reasonable to expect that the CIA would monitor the interrogation by video or audio recording or other means.”
After all, since the CIA regards itself as a premier intelligence organization, in the process of sending a prisoner it believes has extremely valuable information to be extracted in another country, surely the CIA would want proof from that country of the information it had wrenched from the prisoner.
The letters to Hayden and Mukasey ask for replies no later than Dec. 19. As of this writing, I have no information that answers have been received. A similar letter by Durbin has been sent to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice with the same deadline.
Nat Hentoff is a nationally renowned authority on the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights and author of many books.