Senators Slam CIA Tape Destruction

Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee slammed both the destruction of videotapes depicting CIA interrogations of al Qaeda operatives and the aggressive interrogation techniques suspected to be used in those interrogations.

Earlier this week, it was revealed that the CIA had videotaped interrogations of at least two terrorism suspects in 2002. The existence of the tapes, and their later destruction, had been hidden from members of Congress, the courts and even the 9/11 Commission.

"Burning tapes, destroying evidence, I don't know how deep this goes," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., said on Face the Nation. "Could there be obstruction of justice? Yes. How far does this go up in the White House - who knew it? I don't know."

There are questions as to why the tapes were destroyed. CIA director Michael Hayden has said it was done to protect the identity of the interrogators, a claim which was met with derision on Capitol Hill, since individual agents' identities could be blurred or redacted.

But a well informed source told CBS News national security correspondent David Martin that the recordings were destroyed to avoid criminal prosecution of CIA officials.

"I don't have anything against taping," Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., told Bob Schieffer, "because it works out for the benefit of the one who is being interrogated - bad treatment clearly comes up. It also protects the person who is doing the interrogating by showing that he or she is doing it in the proper fashion."

"But these particular tapes, I don't know why they were destroyed," he said. "And I also don't know why we didn't find out about that until 2006."

As the Chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Rockefeller is a member of the Gang of Four - the top Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate intelligence committees - and has been briefed on the CIA interrogation program.

However, because such information remains secret, the congressional members are not allowed to disclose anything discussed, years after the fact - even so much as to disclose whether something was not discussed.

But, he said information was still withheld. Rockefeller said he learned of the tapes' destruction from reading of it in the newspapers.

All Rockefeller could say about his past briefings on CIA interrogations was, "I was really disturbed by what I was reading and what we grew to know."

The destruction of the tapes points to possible charges of obstruction of justice, but it is unknown how far up in the administration it could lead, after reports surfaced that former White House counsel Harriet Miers told the CIA not to destroy the tapes back in 2005.

Hagel said he doubted that senior Bush administration member didn't know about the tapes since the issue of detainee interrogations has been "rattling around the White House and in the Congress and the media for the last few years."

"Maybe they're so incompetent that that's what happened," Hagel said. "I would say that is gross malfeasance and incompetency if that did in fact happen."

The Justice Department and the CIA announced Saturday that they will conduct a joint inquiry into the matter, to determine whether a full investigation is warranted.

There have been some calls on Attorney General Mike Mukasey to appoint a special counsel, but Rockefeller and Hagel both said that would be unnecessary.

"I don't think there's a need for a special counsel, and I don't think there's a need for a special commission," Rockefeller said. "It is the job of the Intelligence Committees to do that."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has called Hayden to appear before the panel on Tuesday to talk about interrogation and techniques.

There are also questions as to what is depicted in the interrogations: Were techniques used that were illegal? Would the very existence of the tapes - like the images of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq - have proved detrimental to the world's image of America?

"You can speculate," Rockefeller said. "Were there things on those tapes that they didn't want to have seen, that didn't conform to what the attorney general would allow them to do? Were they just trying to bury the general subject?"

Rockefeller and Hagel said that, because torture and aggressive tactics like waterboarding are unreliable as intelligence gathering tools, their use has set back American efforts to secure the nation in the face of terrorist threats.

"Everyone that I have ever talked to about this since I've been in the Senate, and my experience in the Army and in Vietnam has said and confirmed, that inhumane, cruel variations of torture do not work for many reasons," Hagel said. "Now if it doesn't work, then why are we doing it?"

Rockefeller pointed out that several past efforts on Capitol Hill to reign in the intelligence community's interrogation practices have failed.

"We are so undermining our position in the world. We are signatories of the Geneva Convention. We were the leaders there of that," Hagel said. "We are saying what to the world - that the Army field manual [which prohibits torture] applies to our armed services people, but the CIA and all these Blackwater-type variations of militias and armies are unaccountable to that?

"That's not who we are as Americans - we're better than that," Hagel said. "The world wants us to be better than that."