Terrorists, Lies, and Videotape December 10, 2007

What I want to know is why this is just supposed to be OK, supposed to be an acceptable exercise of executive power.

This past weekend (because things like this always get published on Saturdays), it was brought to light that, despite being warned by the Justice Department and the White House against doing so, the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first three terror suspects to be detained and interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret prisons after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hundreds of hours of video were destroyed in 2005, with the videos showing “severe interrogation techniques” used on the two alleged al-Qaeda operatives. Apparently psychologists were also involved.

The House Intelligence Committee warned against destroying the tapes, as did the White House and Justice Department, but Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the chief of the CIA’s Directorate of Operations, didn’t even respond to their directive, reversed Congress’ decision, and ordered the tapes destroyed. The tapes were ordered to be destroyed in November 2005 because, as the New York Times reports, the tapes “could have set off controversies about the legality of the interrogations and generate a backlash in the Middle East.”

CBS News’ Kevin Drum speculates as to what the tapes would have shown, quoting a gloss to Ron Suskind’s One Percent Doctrine:

They strapped Abu Zubaydah to a water-board, which reproduces the agony of drowning. They threatened him with certain death. They withheld medication. They bombarded him with deafening noise and harsh lights, depriving him of sleep.

Under that duress, he began to speak of plots of every variety — against shopping malls, banks, supermarkets, water systems, nuclear plants, apartment buildings, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty. With each new tale, “thousands of uniformed men and women raced in a panic to each…target.” And so, Suskind writes, “the United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered.”

Then-White House Counsel Harriet Miers, three officials have said, knew about the videos and urged the CIA not to destroy them:

Intelligence officials say the decision to destroy the tapes was made by Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s covert-operations division. Even former CIA director Porter Goss did not know the tapes were destroyed. The White House said today President Bush didn’t know either.

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., asked, “What would cause the CIA to take this action? The answer is obvious — coverup.”

Attorneys for one Yemeni detainee pointed to a June 10, 2005 directive which requires that the government “preserve and maintain all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees.”

But Mr. Rodriguez somehow circumvented all of that.

And now the White House is all of a sudden going silent as to why the CIA would do this. What are they trying to coverup?

Don’t tell me it’s torture, because that’s old news. Abu Ghraib resulted in court martials and convictions, and Gitmo has become a household word in most politically aware circles. Perhaps we have no real idea as to the extent of the torture which was being employed in these interrogation techniques. If the CIA was so concerned that there would be “controversies as to the legality” of these techniques worldwide, setting off a backlash, that they would destroy videos in defiance of the White House, Justice Department, and Congress, maybe waterboarding is only the tip of the iceberg, so to speak.

Some officials are saying Rodriguez only acted to protect subordinates, that he was a good guy (hero, even) “concerned about how all this would end,” that he didn’t want some “GS-12s” to get in trouble. (This obviously conflicts with the “legality-slash-backlash” official story. But this is politics — we can’t get bogged down by truth and consistency.)

And, in the end, it’s still possible that two tapes still exist. If this is true, if they ever come to light, this will all have been for naught and Mr. Rodriguez’s boys could still go down for 20 years, and the protesting from Jakarta to Jenin could still happen.

Abu Zubaydah may never recover from his experiences. Will our country ever recover from the tarnished image we’ve given ourselves worldwide?