Here’s the New York Times article breaking the story and here’s an article in Harper’s discussing the situation.
In short, in 2005 the CIA destoyed video tapes made in 2002 of interrogation of terror suspects.
How big of a crime is the destruction of the video tapes? How big a crime did the tapes show? How far up the chain of command could prosecutions go for both the torture reportedly on the tapes and the destruction of them?
Some lawyers think it’s a big deal:
Firstly - and less important - there may be illegal conduct by the CIA in destroying evidence. Perhaps of itself a crime and also at the time, a possible breach of orders of the Court demanding it produce such evidence.
Secondly - and more important - there is a probability that convicted and detained people are able to secure release on the basis that the CIA/government, knowing it was in possession of powerful exculpatory/tending to show innocence evidence for the person, then made a policy decision to destroy that evidence.
The second one wouldn’t be so bad if it wasn’t for the first. Even hardcore spook-fellating kool-aid drinkers are going to have trouble with this one, because it’s so obvious that there’s no non-nefarious excuse for it. CIA used to could preserve at least a sliver of plausible deniability, even in the cowboy days. This one’s even more of a bungle than their Castro assassination attempts.
It’s a big deal because we are proven torturers and liars, and it’s a bit of a struggle promoting our brand of democracy when the whole world knows this.
I’m not sure that this question is answerable as General Question, and may well have to be moved into Great Debates. Further, this story has just broken, and there will no doubt be many new disclosures over the next few days and weeks.
Keeping it factual, I just heard a radio news report that the destruction may have violated a court order directing the CIA to produce the videotapes in response to a Freedom of Information Act request, possibly subjecting them to contempt or even obstruction of justice charges.
That is roughly want I wanted to say. The CIA has always lied and done stupid or maybe even illegal and immoral things. Selling arms in the Middle East and screwing around in Latin America for decades was hardly above water. Everyone knows that they lie all the time but it sounds better if they are doing it a higher level than simply torturing people and shredding tapes. This is hardly surprising but I doubt that few Americans will actually care about this story. It is a big yawner compared to even more interesting CIA stories like Iran-Contra that few people cared to understand in any depth despite being vastly more interesting than missing evidence.
One of the reasons that this looks particularly bad for the CIA is that these videotapes represented intelligence gathered as part of the struggle agaisnt Al Qaeda. They’re the sort of thing that you’d want to keep around indefinitely, just in case you wanted to refer back to them at a future date just in case you missed something the first time around: Maybe the initial translation of the interrogation weren’t particularly accurate, or someone didn’t notice a particular facial expression or inflection.
The fact that they were so eager to destroy them even though they might have had future intelligence value makes it look very much like they had something to hide.
Yeah, I’m not naive and expect them to totally be the guys in the white hats or anything, because it’s a dirty business, but jeez, couldn’t they at least be good at being bad? Maybe we should contract out the mob for this stuff; they can at least bury Hoffa’s body under the end zone in the Meadowlands instead of leaving it on the 50 yard line on game day.
That at the time it was destroyed there was a legal investigation into the techniques. Maybe there was… I don’t know. If a politican starts making noises about bad things and calling for an investigation does that count? They do that all the time.
or…
That the results of the interrogation and the procedure in getting it was evidence in proceedings that the detainees might face. Then its a matter of what proceedings were anticipated I would think. Remember at one time, and perhaps still, there was question whether the detainees would be tried and where.