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Friday, December 7th, 2007...2:10 pm

CIA Torture Tapes

Everyone paying attention, by now has heard or read reports that the CIA destroyed video tapes of torture sessions. Why?

CIA Director Michael Hayden released a statement he had sent to CIA employees in which he indicated that the tapes “were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries.” The tapes were destroyed when the CIA director was renowned political hack Porter Goss, who you will remember elevated to the agency’s number 3 position a buddy who was later indicted on corruption charges.

So why were the tapes destroyed? Hayden passes it off as a bit of tidying up the office, as the tapes were no longer needed.

It seems obvious that the tapes contained evidence of torture that folks in the Cheney administration did not want the public to ever see. When war crimes trials are looming as a possibility then one certainly wouldn’t want tapes proving such charges laying around the office. Especially when an agency official with access to the tapes could have a bout of conscience. Hopefully someone in the agency already has somehow documented the tapes’ content.

Remember that those administration intellectual giants Alberto Gonzales and John Yoo had developed a tortured (pun entirely intended) interpretation of statute and treaty law to establish that the president may legally authorize “interrogation” methods which clearly fall under the long accepted definition of torture. (Yoo, you’ll remember, is the guy who stated in a debate at Notre Dame in December 2005 that there is no treaty that legally prohibits the president from approving “crushing the testicles of the person’s child”.)

So if the torturing was legal, why did Porter Goss think it best to destroy evidence.

Because the Bush administration psychopaths involved in this type of stuff know perfectly well what methods of interrogation are legally permitted under long standing USA and international law and that they encouraged methods that fall without the law.

UPDATE: David Kurtz, at the TPM site, passes on the comments of a reader making the same point.

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