Questions About Tapegate
We quickly have the answer to at least one of the important questions swirling around Tapegate, the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction of interrogation videotapes that were at the time sought by a federal judge in the terror conspiracy trial of Zacarias Moussaoui. And in turn the answer we now have raises a whole new generation of questions about the reckless act.
The New York Times this morning reports that CIA lawyers gave "written approval in advance" to destroy hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations. Specifically, citing its unnamed source, the Times reports:
The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes. "They never told us, 'Hell, no,'" he said. "If somebody had said, 'You cannot destroy them,' we would not have destroyed them."If the paper's information is accurate, we now know two things. We know that the CIA was unwilling to take a wishy-washy "no" for an answer when the White House and Justice Department "advised" against the destruction of the tapes. The Times says that even the Agency's chief lawyer, John A. Rizzo, was not asked for final approval before the CIA destroyed the tapes. Based upon this evidence alone a cynic might conclude that the Agency did precisely what it wanted to do (eliminate evidence of the conduct of its agents) and then tried to paper over its intentions with some sort of legal justification.
We also now know that the White House and Justice Department did not go nearly far enough in ensuring that the tapes—material evidence in a pending capital case—were protected from destruction by an Agency that had made known its wishes to get rid of them. Over the weekend, The Washington Post used the word "opposition" to describe the Justice Department's reaction to the Agency's request to destroy the tapes. The Times used the words "advised against."
What do these words and phrases really mean? I have no idea. Surely it was within the power of the White House or the Justice Department to unambiguously order the CIA not to destroy the tapes. Surely even Harriet Miers (then White House counsel) or Alberto Gonzales (then Attorney General) knew how to use their authority to execute the Administration's goals. So was their "opposition" to the destruction of the tapes conveniently half-hearted? Or was there truly a dangerous breakdown in the chain-of-command.
Those, apparently, are questions for another day.