"Tapegate" Unravels
Check out more of Cohen's commentary here — and let us know what you think.
The Justice Department's controversial court filing on late Friday night — shhh, while everyone is sleeping! — isn't worthy of all the media attention it got over the rest of the weekend.Neither was Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey's "nuts to you" response to legislators when they asked for updated information about the Department's investigation into Tapegate, the Central Intelligence Agency's destruction of terror interrogation videotapes.
The post-happy-hour filing came in the case of two detainees. The federal judge in this case had ordered the government back in 2005 to protect from destruction "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."
The Justice Department told U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy that he should now inquire no further into Tapegate and that, even if tapes were destroyed by the CIA, they were not at the time subject to his court order because the men in question were not being held at Gitmo.