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by Joby Warrick and
Walter Pincus
Washington Post
Staff Writers and Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, January 16, 2008; Page A01
In late 2005, the
retiring CIA station chief in Bangkok sent a classified cable to his
superiors in Langley asking if he could destroy videotapes recorded at a
secret CIA prison in Thailand that in part portrayed intelligence
officers using simulated drowning to extract information from suspected
al-Qaeda members.
The tapes had been
sitting in the station chief's safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for
nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had
pushed for the tapes' destruction in those years and a secret debate
about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted
on those requests. This time was different.
The CIA had a new
director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block
the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station
chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the
matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a
published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an
international outcry.
Those three
circumstances pushed the CIA's then-director of clandestine operations,
Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least
five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency
since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA
lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order
the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do
so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.
In a classified
response to the station chief, Rodriguez ordered the tapes' destruction,
CIA officials say. The Justice Department and the House intelligence
committee are now investigating whether that deed constituted a
violation of law or an obstruction of justice. John A. Rizzo, the CIA's
acting general counsel, is scheduled to discuss the matter in a closed
House intelligence committee hearing scheduled for today.
According to
interviews with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials
familiar with the debate, the taping was conducted from August to
December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the
detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and
were not causing a detainee's death.
The principal motive
for the tapes' destruction was the clandestine operations division's
worry that the tapes' fate could be snatched out of their hands, the
officials said. They feared that the agency could be publicly shamed and
that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation
techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional
inquiry -- a circumstance now partly unfolding anyway.
"The professionals
said that we must destroy the tapes because they didn't want to see the
pictures all over television, and they knew they eventually would leak,"
said a former agency official who took part in the discussions before
the tapes were pulverized. The presence of the tapes in Bangkok and the
CIA's communications with the station chief there were described by
current and former officials.
Congressional
investigators have turned up no evidence that anyone in the Bush
administration openly advocated the tapes' destruction, according to
officials familiar with a set of classified documents forwarded to
Capitol Hill. "It was an agency decision -- you can take it to the
bank," CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said in an interview on Friday.
"Other speculations that it may have been made in other compounds, in
other parts of the capital region, are simply wrong."
Many of those
involved recalled conversations in which senior CIA and White House
officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly
prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such
a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then
interpreted this silence -- the absence of a decision to order the
tapes' preservation -- as a tacit approval of their destruction.
"Jose could not get
any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior
official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official
said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and
Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately,
by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed
on exchanges between the two men.
"Frankly, there were
more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to
preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships
that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the
secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss's
position at the time.
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