Worth Reading

Scott Horton, writing for Harpers magazine online, covers the changing administration explanation of the destruction of videos by the CIA, its implausibility, and possible motives.

As the story concerning the CIA’s decision to destroy vital evidence of its program of detainee abuse unfolds, the Bush Administration’s posture on the matter is shifting decisively. This is called “damage control.” The Administration’s initial posture was to have CIA Director Hayden put the best face on the situation and argue that everything that was done was perfectly legal and correct.

So now we come to phase two: the fall-back position. In phase two, we learn that the president and other senior figures in the Administration know nothing about it. Instead, this was all a rogue operation by a second tier leadership figure at the CIA. And indeed, by midday yesterday, White House off-the-record explainers were extremely busy pointing fingers at one man, the designated scapegoat. The New York Times has the story:

White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday. The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said. . .

Horton suggests otherwise:

But is the scapegoating strategy even marginally plausible? No, it isn’t. First, we have the opening volley—everything was disclosed and approved in advance. Even the oversight committees were briefed on this. Everything was kosher. So now we’re being told that they briefed Rockefeller and Harman, but not President Bush. Does anybody believe that for even a second? Not, it’s not plausible. And all this relates to an issue that has involved the White House like no other issue since the Bush Administration began. The highly coercive interrogation program—the “Program”—was Dick Cheney’s baby. He lobbied the CIA to adopt it and turned to extraordinary measures to overcome their initial reluctance. (This is how we got the torture memoranda at Justice, after all). And let’s keep in mind that this is a White House in love with secrecy and the destruction of internal documents which might prove compromising. (Think: Dick Cheney and his visitors’ logs; think: Karl Rove’s missing emails, now put at 10,000,000 and counting).

But let’s go the next layer down, to CIA. Could a director of ops authorize the destruction of evidence wanted in a federal criminal case, in the face of a court order for their production all by his lonesome with no consultation and approval from above? We have the answer in the initial Hayden memo: this steps taken were done in accordance with the law and agency procedure, he says. So the answer to that question is that it certainly wasn’t just Rodriguez.

So, there are now on offer mutually exclusive explanations of just how the tapes came to be destroyed. The truth remains to be determined, quite possibly at trial.

But what was on the tapes that made them worth destroying, risking obstruction of justice charges? Kevin Drum has interesting speculations, based on what others have already told us about Abu Zubaydah, who would have been on one of the tapes.

So here's what the tapes would have shown: not just that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative, but that we had brutally tortured an al-Qaeda operative who was (a) unimportant and low-ranking, (b) mentally unstable, (c) had no useful information, and (d) eventually spewed out an endless series of worthless, fantastical "confessions" under duress. This was all prompted by the president of the United States, implemented by the director of the CIA, and the end result was thousands of wasted man hours by intelligence and and law enforcement personnel.

The full reasoning behind this theory can be followed here.