Editorial: Government deceit revealed

Monday, Dec. 10, 2007 | 7:07 a.m.

In an astonishing announcement last week, CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the agency destroyed videotapes documenting agents' harsh 2002 interrogation of terror suspects - destruction that took place in 2005, at the same time that a federal judge asked the CIA to turn over such recordings.

Hayden told Central Intelligence Agency employees on Thursday that he was notifying them of the incident because The New York Times was going to publish a story about it in Friday's editions.

The CIA destroyed the tapes to protect the identities of the agents involved in the interrogations and because the tapes no longer had intelligence value, Hayden said.

The admission also raises serious doubts about how forthcoming and truthful CIA officials were with the 9/11 Commission, which had explicitly asked about the existence of any video or audio recordings. The commission issued its report in 2004, well before the CIA disposed of the tapes.

The tapes made in 2002 apparently were destroyed in late 2005 - after a U.S. District Court judge had, during a hearing in the case of terrorist suspect Zacarias Moussaoui, asked whether interrogation tapes of other suspected terrorists existed, the Times reports.

The judge eventually narrowed his request to specific interrogations, and CIA lawyers told the court in 2003 and in 2005 that it did not have recordings of those interrogations.

It is unclear whether the recordings that the judge demanded were those that the CIA destroyed. Moussaoui ultimately received a sentence of life in prison after being convicted in 2006 of withholding some information that might have prevented the 9/11 attacks.

Hayden said his agency had informed members of congressional intelligence oversight committees of the CIA's intention to destroy the tapes.

But the leaders of the House Intelligence Committee during 2005 told the Times that they had not been notified of the plan and that the full committee should have been briefed on it.

This deceit and arrogance on the part of the CIA is par for the course for President Bush's administration, which acts as though it is above the law.

Clearly, Hayden and other high-ranking members of the CIA have more explaining to do - certainly before Congress, and possibly before a federal court.