Hayden’s Letter
Marty Lederman has posted a copy of Michael Hayden’s letter to the CIA from yesterday. I wanted to riff further on it. The non-bold brackets below are Marty’s comments. The bold italics are mine. I know this may be hard to read, but I wanted to leave in Marty’s comments because he’s a lot smarter than I am.
Message from the Director: Taping of Early Detainee Interrogations
The press has learned that back in 2002, during the initial stage of our terrorist detention program, CIA videotaped interrogations, and destroyed the tapes in 2005. I understand Note the voice here and recall that they seem to never have fully briefed Mike McConnell on all the details of the illegal warrantless wiretap program. I’m wondering how Hayden "understands" this process? Does he have all the details? that the Agency did so only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries–including the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. [What about the 9/11 Commission? What about the failure to tell the Moussaoui judge about these tapes? What about the obvious future legislative and judicial inquiries? (Note that the destruction likely occurred just after Dana Priest broke the story of the CIA black sites in 2005.)] I’m not sure I agree with Marty–I think other possible dates for the destruction of the tapes, given the timeline, are around the time when OLC was writing new opinions on torture (between May 10 and May 30, 2005). That said, if the tapes were destroyed after Priest’s story (November 1), then they were almost certainly destroyed after Brinkema asked for the damn things (November 3) but before the government said they didn’t have them (November 14), which would make the claim that they were not relevant to a judicial proceedings a bald-faced lie. The decision to destroy the tapes was made within CIA itself. The leaders of our oversight committees in Congress were informed of the videos years ago and of the Agency’s intention to dispose of the material. [Yes, and what did they say about that?] Our oversight committees also have been told that the videos were, in fact, destroyed. I love the timing on this. Given the reporting, I’m guessing the Intell Committees were informed in 2003 (when Jane Harman wrote her CYA letter), and then informed they had been destroyed in 2006 (when it was too late to do anything about it). I had thought yesterday that the heads of the Intell Committees were told in 2005, during the debates on torture and the fallout from Abu Ghraib. But apparently the CIA kept mum about that.
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