Do They Have it on DVD? [UPDATED]
UPDATE: Michelle reports some people have a few more qualms than I do.
First smart thing the CIA’s done in years (that we’ve heard about anyway):
The CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of al Qaeda suspects because they no longer had “intelligence value” and they posed a security risk, CIA director Michael Hayden said Thursday.
The tapes were made in 2002 and destroyed in 2005, Hayden said in a letter to CIA employees obtained by CNN.
They were made as “an internal check” on the CIA’s use of harsh interrogation techniques, believed to include waterboarding, a technique that involves restraining a suspect and pouring water on them to simulate drowning.
The agency made the decision to destroy the tapes “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative, or judicial inquiries,” Hayden said.
…
A government official with knowledge of the tapes said the tapes were of al Qaeda operative Abu Zubayda and another detainee.
Much as I’d enjoy watching these vids on YouTube, that’s not really their point, is it? As the article makes clear, Zubayda led the interrogators to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so everybody should be happy, right?
Yeah, right.
Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said news the CIA destroyed the videotapes “is troubling, and it fits a pattern we have seen repeatedly during this administration.”
“When an administration abandons the moral high ground to take the low road, they are mortgaging the historic commitment to human rights that is part of the legacy of every American. The damage is compounded when such actions are hidden away from accountability“
Block that metaphor!