CIA interrogation tapes destroyed

The CIA has admitted it destroyed video tapes showing the interrogation of two terror suspects by the American intelligence agency.

The director of the agency told staff the action, three years after the interviews, was taken out of fear the tapes would be leaked and compromise the interrogators’ identities.

Disclosure of the 2002 interrogation and subsequent destruction brought immediate condemnation from Congress and from a human rights group that said the spy agency’s action amounted to criminal destruction of evidence.

CIA Director Michael Hayden said the CIA began taping the interrogations as an internal check on the programme after President George Bush authorised the use of harsh questioning methods.

The methods included water-boarding, which simulates drowning, government officials said.

“The agency was determined that it proceed in accord with established legal and policy guidelines. So, on its own, CIA began to videotape interrogations,” Mr Hayden said in a written message to CIA employees, obtained by The Associated Press yesterday.

The CIA decided to destroy the tapes in “the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them”, Hayden wrote.

He said the tapes were destroyed only after it was determined “they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries”.

“The tapes posed a serious security risk,” Mr Hayden wrote. “Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the programme, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al Qaida and its sympathisers.”

Mr Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA’s intention to destroy them.

He also said the CIA’s internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were legal.

Rep 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.

“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Ms Harman said.

While certain lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency went through with the plan, said two congressional officials.

Rep Pete Hoekstra, who was Republican 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 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 destroying the tapes was illegal.

“Basically this is destruction of evidence,” she said, calling Mr Hayden’s explanation that the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA identities “disingenuous”.

The CIA only taped the interrogation of the first two terror suspects the agency held, one of whom was Abu Zubaydah.

Zubaydah, under harsh questioning, told CIA interrogators about an alleged accomplice in the September 11, 2001, terror attacks, Ramzi Binalshibh, Mr Bush said in 2006.

Binalshibh was captured and interrogated and, with Abu Zubaydah’s information, led to the capture in 2003 of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the purported mastermind of the attacks.

Hayden said 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,” Mr Hayden said.

The CIA is known to have waterboarded three prisoners since the September 11 attacks, but not since 2003. Mr Hayden banned the use of the procedure in 2006, according to knowledgeable officials.

Disclosure of the tapes’ destruction came on the day the House and Senate intelligence committees agreed to legislation prohibiting the CIA from using “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

The White House threatened yesterday to veto the bill.

Mr Hayden’s message was an attempt to get ahead of a New York Times story about the videotapes.

“What matters here is that it was done in line with the law,” Mr Hayden said. “Over the course of its life, the Agency’s interrogation programme 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 defence 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 attacks.

These requests heated up in 2005 as the defence slowly learned the identities of more detainees in US custody.

In May 2005, US 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 November 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.

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 programme 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.