Details on why CIA tapes were made, destroyed

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...5_tapes30.html

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI

The New York Times
12/30/2007

WASHINGTON — If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of al-Qaida, died in U.S. hands, CIA officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in spring 2002, as the intelligence officers flew in a surgeon from Johns Hopkins Hospital to treat Abu Zubaydah, who had been shot three times during his capture in Pakistan, they set up video cameras to record his every moment: asleep in his cell, having his bandages changed, being questioned by interrogators.

Current and former intelligence officials said the agency's action concerning the interrogation videotapes was prompted, in part, by worry about how its conduct might be perceived by Congress, by prosecutors, by the U.S. public and by Muslims worldwide.

What drove decision
This worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners had escalated to include waterboarding. And it fueled the nearly three-year campaign by the agency's clandestine service for permission to destroy the tapes, culminating in a November 2005 destruction order from the director of the service, Jose Rodriguez Jr.

The Justice Department, the CIA's inspector general and Congress are conducting investigations to determine whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged the destruction of the tapes and whether the CIA hid the tapes from the national Sept. 11 commission.

Interviews with two dozen current and former officials, most of whom would speak about the classified program only on the condition of anonymity, revealed new details about why the tapes were made and then eliminated.

Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, several intelligence officials said.

"You couldn't have more than one or two analysts in the room," said A.B. Krongard, the CIA's No. 3 official at the time the interrogations were taped. "You want people with spectacular language skills to watch the tapes. You want your top al-Qaida experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes."

Given such advantages, why was the taping stopped by the end of 2002, less than a year after it started? "By that time," Krongard said, "paranoia was setting in."

By several accounts, the decision to begin taping Abu Zubaydah and another detainee suspected of being an al-Qaida operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was made in the field, with several goals in mind.

First, there was Abu Zubaydah's condition, one former intelligence official said.

Just as important was that for many years the CIA had rarely conducted standard interrogations, so officials wanted to track the use of interrogation methods.

But months later, the taping was stopped. Some field officers had never liked the idea. "If you're a case officer, the last thing you want is someone in Washington second-guessing everything you did," said one former agency veteran.

More significant, interrogations of Abu Zubaydah had gotten rougher, with each new tactic approved by cable from headquarters.

Torture technique
U.S. officials have said Abu Zubaydah was the first al-Qaida prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner's mouth and nose to simulate drowning. Officials thought they could not risk a leak of film showing Americans giving such treatment to bound prisoners.

By late 2002, interrogators were recycling videotapes, preserving only two days of tapes before recording over them, one CIA officer said. Finally, senior agency officials decided written summaries of prisoners' answers would suffice.

That decision still left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two al-Qaida figures locked in an overseas safe.

Clandestine service officers who had overseen the interrogations began pushing hard to destroy the tapes. But George Tenet, then director of central intelligence, was wary, in part because the agency's top lawyer, Scott Muller, advised against it, current and former officials said.

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill. In February 2003, Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the CIA's interest in destroying the tapes.

Porter Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman, of California, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. CIA officials did not press the matter.

Scrutiny of the CIA's secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency's inspector general, John Helgerson, began investigating the program.

He completed his investigation in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded some of the CIA's techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture.

A month later, as the administration reeled from the Abu Ghraib revelations, Muller, the agency general counsel, met to discuss the report with three senior lawyers at the White House: Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel; David Addington, legal adviser for Vice President Dick Cheney; and John Bellinger, top lawyer at the National Security Council.

One Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Bellinger advised the CIA against destroying the tapes.

After Tenet and Muller left the CIA in mid-2004, Rodriguez and other officials decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Goss, the former congressman.

Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004.

At a meeting in Goss' office with Rodriguez, John Rizzo, who had replaced Muller as the agency's top lawyer, told the new CIA director the clandestine branch wanted a decision on the tapes. According to two people close to Goss, he told them he thought the tapes should be preserved.

In November 2005, Rodriguez and his aides decided to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official said Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the CIA officers on the tapes.

"We didn't want them to become political scapegoats," he said.