Psyche, Science, and Society

Horton dissects White House/NYT spin on CIA torture tapes

Scott Horton, in a must read piece,  carefully dissects the New York Times article today on the creation and destruction of the CIA torture tapes [I posted the Times article here.] He views the article as part of the attempt to distance the White House from the tapes, their destruction, and the torture they depict. After quoting from the article, here is Horton’s analysis:

 Let’s think through what we’re being told for a moment. And let’s start with the circumstances. The Administration has launched what Laura Rozen recently termed “Operation Stop Talking,” a program designed to insure that all intelligence officers and former officers maintain complete silence about what transpired with these tapes. This has included some very heavy handed measures, including an FBI investigation targeting John Kiriakou. My own sources tell me that Rozen’s reporting is right on the money about this—the word has been put out that any one allowing further information to slip out, or corroborating Kiriakou’s account, can expect severe retribution. And what is the objective of this extraordinary public relations project? Again, the aspect of Kiriakou’s remarks that gave rise to it was his detailed depiction of the Justice Department’s and the White House’s role in the entire process.

The Bush Administration’s containment strategy for this matter is very clear: it was a CIA affair, start to finish. The decision to make and destroy the tapes came down in the ranks of the CIA. Other agencies and particularly the White House were uninvolved. Yes, there will be a scapegoat offered up. So here are some points to contemplate as you work your way through the New York Times piece:

• Why is a former senior CIA official speaking on the record about details of the program notwithstanding “Operation Stop Talking?” Note who he is: A.R. Kronberg—“Cookie” Kronberg’s better regarded brother—was a Blackwater advisor and was considered to be a Republican Party-wired “insider” within the intelligence community. Mr. Kronberg is, of course, dispensing “the official story,” just what others have been silenced to make way for.

• Note that the decision to start making the tapes was made in the field according to Shane’s and Mazzetti’s sources. That’s a very convenient set of facts, since in a fairly axiomatic rule of bureaucratic decision-making presumably those who make the decision to make the tapes have the authority to decide to destroy them. But even other statements in this Times piece contradict that conclusion, starting with the concern that the tapes would be used by figures far up the line to “second guess” the work of the case officers.

• But is it true? If we go back over Kiriakou’s statements, we find nothing really conclusive on the subject. But he’s quite emphatic over the strong line of control over the operating program, ending squarely in the White House. He also suggests very clearly that the tapes are being used for control purposes; that they allowed people up the decision-making chain to see how their instructions were being carried out. It would be a reasonable inference from this that the taping procedure was introduced and used by those with oversight authority, and potentially very far up the chain. I have heard for sometime that some of Vice President Cheney’s staffers, starting with Addington, are real “intelligence junkies.” Why would they entertain themselves with reruns of Fox’s “24″ when they can mainline real snuff flicks provided by the CIA?

• The new account offers that the tapes served training and analytical purposes. That’s a plausible explanation, but it’s not the only one offered even in this article. It also takes note of the Bagram deaths and suggests that the tapes would prove that the officers administering torture were following approved techniques–to protect them. Note this is an oversight and control function. It seems inescapable that the tapes were made and used for all these purposes, and the oversight and control purpose was likely the most important, even if now–for transparent reasons–they want to play it down.

• The new account says that tapes were being reused starting in 2002. This is a very significant statement on several fronts. It reflects that taping was a general practice, and it suggests one method of destroying tapes was taping right over them. That suggests that there were many more tapes made than just the two cases noted. (In fact, in the meantime, newspapers in Britain and Australia have already reported, courtesy of their own intelligence services, that the claims that the collections of tapes was limited to two subjects is nonsense.)

The Times story reflects the latest Administration effort at damage control, and it has to be understood in that light, which is to say, very skeptically. Is it true that the decision to tape and the decision to destroy the tapes was taken far down the ranks within the CIA and that the White House had no involvement in it? Note how they carefully sprinkle in the reference to the suggestion that “Bush agreed” that he should not be briefed on the location of the black sites. They are really working very hard to put whatever distance they can between Bush personally and the criminal decisions in play here.

And in the end, the effort is completely unconvincing. We know that the White House knew about the existence of the tapes. Four of the president’s leading lawyers were deeply involved, and one of them, almost certainly Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington, was advocating destruction of the tapes, and thereby offering apparent White House authority for the act of destruction. It’s highly probable that individuals inside the White House, and in all likelihood the president himself, actually watched some of the tapes, most likely including the tapes of Abu Zabaydah, who was tortured by waterboarding.

Now they desperately want to pin everything on second and third tier officials at the CIA. That would be a farce. Responsibility for all of this—the decision to torture, the specific approval of individual torture techniques on specific individuals, the decision to record and document all of this, and the decision in the face of court orders requiring preservation and disclosure to destroy evidence of criminal conduct—rests squarely with George W. Bush and the senior echelons of his administration. It’s time to confront all efforts to obscure these facts through friendly leaks with the skepticism and, indeed, contempt that they deserve.

The Times piece closes on an appropriate note. They interview former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, and describe his analysis of the situation:

“Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods. “To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.” “

It is not a matter of “looking like torture,” of course, the process of waterboarding and other harsh techniques that Bush has authorized (indeed, shoved down the throat of a skeptical intelligence community) is torture. It’s a crime under American law which will be enforced again when law enforcement is restored to the agenda of the Justice Department.

The Times tells us that public appearances played a decisive role in this entire affair, and that’s the most truthful statement in the piece. But there is something unsettling about this tendency to dismiss a question of moral rights and wrongs on the most fundamental level as a question of “public relations.” Team Bush have used all the powerful communications resources at their command to trivialize torture—to equate it with fraternity antics, and to scapegoat immature young soldiers who implement their designs. All of this has been done to suppress the moral indignation that torture, once clearly seen by the American people, would awaken. In this saga of the destroyed tapes we are watching the morally corrosive effects of torture, we are watching it corrupt judgment and social values. As Immanuel Kant teaches us, all humans have an innate sense of moral right and wrong, they feel it instinctively even if they lack a more developed code of ethical or religious standards. Revelation–visual proof of their crimes–is the enemy that Bush and his fellow torture facilitators fear now, more even than the judgment that history certainly will pass upon them.

December 30th, 2007

Liptak reviews Taxi to the Dark Side

Adam Liptak, in the New York Times, reviews Alex Gibney’s new documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side:

The Power of Authority: A Dark Tale

by Adam Liptak

FRANK GIBNEY was old and sick and a little more than a month away from dying. But he was filled with righteous anger, and he had some things to say. He told his son, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, to unplug a noisy oxygen machine and to grab a video camera.

The older Mr. Gibney, a journalist and scholar who died in April, had served as a naval interrogator in World War II. In a moving statement that serves as a sort of coda to “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a new documentary about the Bush administration’s interrogation policies in the post-9/11 world, he said it had never occurred to him to use brutal techniques on the Japanese prisoners in his custody.

“We had the sense that we were on the side of the good guys,” Frank Gibney said, seething. “People would get decent treatment. And there was the rule of law.”

There would seem to be an enormous distance between the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the central events in “Taxi to the Dark Side” take place, and Enron’s headquarters in Houston, where the machinations of white-collar criminals brought down the giant energy company and became the backdrop for Mr. Gibney’s entertaining 2005 documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” But Mr. Gibney said the two projects have common themes.

“The subject of corruption unites my films,” he said. “‘Enron’ was about economic corruption, and ‘Taxi’ is about the corruption of the rule of law.”

In person Mr. Gibney, 54, is simultaneously casual and intense. He wears jeans, cool glasses and a goatee, and he juggles several projects at a time from an office overlooking the rail yards on the west side of Manhattan. On the wall is a poster for “The Trials of Henry Kissinger,” a 2002 documentary that he wrote. He is finishing up a documentary on the writer Hunter S. Thompson and is working on another about the lobbyist Jack Abramoff.

He said he has returned repeatedly to one concern: the power of authority to warp morality. At bottom, Mr. Gibney said, people do what they are told. “Everything in life,” he said, “goes back to the Milgram experiment.”

In the early 1960s Dr. Stanley Milgram, a psychologist at Yale, showed that many people were willing to deliver what they understood to be painful electric shocks to other human beings simply because they were told by a scientist that it was necessary.

At Enron as at Bagram, Mr. Gibney said, “a process had occurred, like Milgram, where they had crossed little personal lines, bit by bit.”

“Until,” he added, “they looked back and realized they were way over the line.”

Mr. Gibney persuaded a half-dozen guards and interrogators to appear in his documentary. They are candid, reflective, troubled and sometimes broken, and their testimony is the beating heart of the film.

Many of the traders at Enron were decent men too, Mr. Gibney said.

“One of the most interesting things for me was to discover that most of these guys, off the job, were really nice guys,” Mr. Gibney said. “I mean, pillars of their community. They gave to charity, set up orphanages. But on the job they were killers.”

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is an artful film, starting with cinematic vistas in Afghanistan and presenting soldiers in tight shots against dark backgrounds while former officials and journalists talk in grand settings filled with light.

Sometimes his filmmaking techniques stray from the journalistic straight-and-narrow. In an otherwise positive review of the Enron documentary, for instance, David Ansen of Newsweek objected to an impressionistic recreation of an executive’s suicide and whispering voices on the soundtrack, calling them “cheesy fictional techniques.”

Mr. Gibney said he is often asked why he does not give it to audiences straight.

His answer: “It’s because I didn’t want to give it to you straight. I wanted to have some fun.”

“Werner Herzog calls it the difference between an accountant’s truth and ecstatic truth,” Mr. Gibney continued. “It’s the idea that sometimes you can take a roundabout way to truth that’s more effective.”

In the new film he uses a re-creation to depict the interrogation of Mohamed al-Kahtani, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

“It took us a long time to get that sequence right, where we juxtaposed words, music, re-creations and then also testimony in some of the Senate hearings,” Mr. Gibney said. By mixing these, “you get some sense of the absurdity, of how the interrogators themselves were becoming unhinged,” he said. “By visualizing it you feel its power in a way you don’t if you just have someone describe it.”

Mr. Gibney became fascinated by film at Yale in the 1970s, haunting the film societies that showed classics for a dollar, and then attended film school at the University of California, Los Angeles. “My favorite filmmakers, generally speaking, are not documentary filmmakers,” he said. One is Luis Buñuel, and he keeps a framed letter from Mr. Buñuel on a wall of his office. “The way he shoots everything is so matter of fact,” Mr. Gibney said. “It’s kind of documentary. But he’s got such a wicked sense of humor. He’s always bringing something to the party, but in ways that you don’t really realize.”

Mr. Gibney worked for years on television series, including “The Fifties” and “The Blues,” bringing lessons from those sprawling projects to his feature films.

“You have to have characters that breathe inside a narrative,” he said, naming one lesson. “That’s what makes it work, and unless that happens none of the big ideas really matter.”

There has been no shortage of films about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and about the Bush administration’s approach to national security and civil liberties. The fictional ones — like “Lions for Lambs,” “Rendition,” “Redacted” and “In the Valley of Elah” — have landed at the box office with a thud. But there seems to be an appetite for accessible and sometimes argumentative documentaries about American power and values presented with nerve and verve, even from the earliest days of the war in Iraq, like “Gunner Palace.”

“Taxi to the Dark Side,” which opens in New York and Los Angeles on Jan. 18, is a sort of companion piece to “No End in Sight,” Charles Ferguson’s recent documentary about the occupation of Iraq. (Mr. Gibney was an executive producer.) The next month, Errol Morris’s documentary about the abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, “S.O.P.: Standard Operating Procedure,” will have its premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival.

The narrative thread of “Taxi to the Dark Side” recounts the story of an Afghan taxi driver known only as Dilawar, who was taken to Bagram and beaten to death. His family, interviewed in the film, described Dilawar as simple and shy, and he left behind a wife and a 2-year-old daughter.

His legs, a coroner’s report found, had been struck over and over again until they “had basically been pulpified.” “Even if he had survived,” an Army report found, “both legs would have had to be amputated.”

Mr. Dilawar’s story was first reported in The New York Times and was the subject of a series of investigative reports in the paper. Two reporters for The Times, Carlotta Gall and Tim Golden, appear in the documentary.

In 2005 a military jury convicted Willie V. Brand, who had been a guard at Bagram, of assault, maltreatment and maiming. But his only punishment was a reduction in rank. He received an honorable discharge.

Mr. Brand and the other guards and interrogators who appear in “Taxi to the Dark Side” make the case that they were untrained, unmoored from morality and only did what they thought their commanders wanted.

A week after the Sept. 11 attacks, for instance, Vice President Dick Cheney appeared on “Meet the Press” and sketched out his thinking.

“We also have to work, though, sort of the dark side, if you will,” he said, in a clip Mr. Gibney includes in his film. “We’ve got to spend time in the shadows of the intelligence world.”

Statements like those generated the abuses at Bagram and Abu Ghraib, Mr. Gibney maintains. “It’s the opposite of the bad apple theory,” he said. “The bad apple theory is that there are a few bad people who occasionally do bad things, and everything’s fine. Mostly they’re good kids who, like all of us, can over to the dark side if people like Dick Cheney say it’s O.K.”

David B. Rivkin, a lawyer in the administrations of President RonaldReagan and the first President Bush, said the abuses in Afghanistan and Iraq were exceptions and unfortunate byproducts of war. “It’s pretty clear that it’s not policy,” he said, “and it’s pretty clear that these things are prosecuted.”

Mr. Rivkin said the military’s performance by historical standards has been quite good in the recent conflicts. “In all the good wars,” he said, “we have had some pretty bad records.”

That is not how Frank Gibney saw it.

After the Second World War Frank Gibney would occasionally meet the men he had interrogated for dinner or drinks in Tokyo, and his son would sometimes tag along. The soldiers had a respectful rapport, a camaraderie.

“It’s hard to imagine that happening 10 years from now,” Alex Gibney said.

December 30th, 2007

Iraqi Kurdish women attempting suicide at alarming rate

In the Kurdish north, the peaceful corner of Iraq, rapid social change is pushing increasing numbers of women to suicide, the Dallas Morning News reports. Since the war, one women a day sets herself alight.

Alas, the article doesn’t really give an explanation for this epidemic of female suicide. There are hints about rapid change, poverty and family tensions. But no insight is provided as to how these are combining to cause the rash of suicides:

Northern Iraqi women increasingly attempting suicide

by Cheryl Diaz Meyer

ERBIL, Iraq – Iman Eaziden Bakr raised her chin, her eyes glistening in the dim light.

“I thought, ‘This is my death,’ ” she said. “I felt like a chicken being roasted. I will never forget the torture of my skin. It was so painful, as if my insides were being exposed.”

Her tea had long gone cold as she recounted Jan. 14, the day she poured kerosene on her body and set herself on fire.

Despite the economic boom in Iraqi Kurdistan, Ms. Bakr and her family are among the majority of Kurds who live in poverty. Eight people live together in one room.

“I started feeling hopeless about life, and I couldn’t bear their fighting anymore,” she said. “So I sacrificed myself for my family. But it was useless.”

When she returned home from the hospital, it was worse.

As new social and economic pressures collide with old traditions in the newly prosperous region of northern Iraq, Kurdish women still exert little control over their lives, health experts say. They struggle to describe a mental malaise that women and girls experience in the patriarchal culture, where women see little hope for their future and find themselves driven to kill themselves at unprecedented levels.

Since 2003, an average of one female sets herself on fire each day in Iraqi Kurdistan, according to Khasro Omar, head nurse of the Emergency Management Centre in Erbil. The center is the premier hospital for burn patients in the area.

Ms. Bakr, 17, said she was diagnosed with depression. But her mother refused to buy the prescribed medicine, fearful that people would think their family was crazy.

“Anyone could see that I was not normal,” she said. “I heard voices telling me to kill myself, but my mother thought I was just being melodramatic.”

Most of the women and girls say they immolated themselves because of unresolved problems with their families. Some had issues in their marriages, while others alleged they were burned by accident as they worked in the kitchen, their long dresses a danger near the flames.

For many of these women, ordinary problems seem magnified. That was the case for 19-year-old Qumri Kaifi.

“I was washing the floor, and my sister kept walking over it, making me upset,” she said. After months of strife between her and her new stepmother, this was the final straw. She went into the kitchen and set herself on fire with her 10-year-old sister watching.

Those who survive suffer estrangement from their families and society. Married women who cannot work because of their injuries are often divorced by their husbands. No organizations in the region have long-term programs to help these women.

In the far end of the Erbil ward lies Aveen Bayz, 13, her brow furrowed in pain and her eyes dark and woeful. She resembles a mummy, almost completely covered in gauze to protect her burns, which cover 70 percent of her skin.

Ms. Bayz said she immolated herself because her younger sister was jealous of her and harassed her for not doing the house chores correctly. She has survived eight days after immolating herself. Even the staff won’t venture to guess if she will live or die.

Nearby, her anguished mother wipes away tears.

“I would do anything for my daughter, if only she’d stay alive,” said Sameera Mohammad. “I wish to hear her voice every morning.”

Nine months have passed since Ms. Bakr’s attempt to kill herself. She still emanates the acrid smell of burned skin, and her scars itch as they crack open and heal.

“I do feel that they love me,” Ms. Bakr said of her family. “But even if I wasn’t making good choices – why didn’t they stop me? I don’t understand their love.”

She still sees little promise for the future.

“I gradually feel myself becoming hopeless again,” she said. “So, I probably will one day succeed in killing myself.”

December 30th, 2007

NYT explains why CIA torture tapes created

The New York Times today provides further explanation of the reasons the CIA torture tapes were created and the debate regarding their destruction. In the article are little tidbits, including that psychologists viewed the tapes:

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’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 Qaeda experts to watch the tapes. You want psychologists to watch the tapes. You want interrogators in training to watch the tapes.”

Also, doctors were viewing them:

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said.

Here is the whole article:

Tapes by C.I.A. Lived and Died to Save Image

by Scott Shane & Mark Mazzetti

If Abu Zubaydah, a senior operative of Al Qaeda, died in American hands, Central Intelligence Agency officers pursuing the terrorist group knew that much of the world would believe they had killed him.

So in the spring of 2002, even 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 interrogated.

In fact, current and former intelligence officials say, the agency’s every action in the prolonged drama of the interrogation videotapes was prompted in part by worry about how its conduct might be perceived — by Congress, by prosecutors, by the American public and by Muslims worldwide.

That worry drove the decision to begin taping interrogations — and to stop taping just months later, after the treatment of prisoners began 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 service’s director, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Now, the disclosure of the tapes and their destruction in 2005 have become just the public spectacle the agency had sought to avoid. To the already fierce controversy over whether the Bush administration authorized torture has been added the specter of a cover-up.

The Justice Department, the C.I.A.’s inspector general and Congress are investigating whether any official lied about the tapes or broke the law by destroying them. Still in dispute is whether any White House official encouraged their destruction and whether the C.I.A. deliberately hid them from the national Sept. 11 commission.

But 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. Their accounts show how political and legal considerations competed with intelligence concerns in the handling of the tapes.

The discussion about the tapes took place in Congressional briefings and secret deliberations among top White House lawyers, including a meeting in May 2004 just days after photographs of abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq had reminded the administration of the power of such images. The debate stretched over the tenure of two C.I.A. chiefs and became entangled in a feud between the agency’s top lawyers and its inspector general. The tapes documented a program so closely guarded that President Bush himself had agreed with the advice of intelligence officials that he not be told the locations of the secret C.I.A. prisons. Had there been no political or security considerations, videotaping every interrogation and preserving the tapes would make sense, according to several intelligence officials.

“You couldn’t have more than one or two analysts in the room,” said A. B. Krongard, the C.I.A.’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 Qaeda 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,” Mr. Krongard said, “paranoia was setting in.”

The Decision to Tape

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

First, there was Abu Zubaydah’s precarious condition. “There was concern that we needed to have this all documented in case he should expire from his injuries,” recalled one former intelligence official.

Just as important was the fact that for many years the C.I.A. had rarely conducted even standard interrogations, let alone ones involving physical pressure, so officials wanted to track closely the use of legally fraught interrogation methods. And there was interest in capturing all the information to be gleaned from a rare resource — direct testimony from those who had attacked the United States.

But just 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. American officials have said that Abu Zubaydah was the first Qaeda prisoner to be waterboarded, a procedure during which water is poured over the prisoner’s mouth and nose to create a feeling of drowning. Officials said they felt they could not risk a public leak of a videotape showing Americans giving such harsh treatment to bound prisoners.

Heightening the worries about the tapes was word of the first deaths of prisoners in American custody. In November 2002, an Afghan man froze to death overnight while chained in a cell at a C.I.A. site in Afghanistan, north of Kabul, the capital. Two more prisoners died in December 2002 in American military custody at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

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

Still, that decision left hundreds of hours of videotape of the two Qaeda figures locked in an overseas safe.

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

Yet agency officials decided to float the idea of eliminating the tapes on Capitol Hill, hoping for political cover. In February 2003, Mr. Muller told members of the House and Senate oversight committees about the C.I.A’s interest in destroying the tapes for security reasons.

But both Porter J. Goss, then a Republican congressman from Florida and the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat, thought destroying the tapes would be legally and politically risky. C.I.A. officials did not press the matter.

The Detention Program

Scrutiny of the C.I.A.’s secret detention program kept building. Later in 2003, the agency’s inspector general, John L. Helgerson, began investigating the program, and some insiders believed the inquiry might end with criminal charges for abusive interrogations.

Mr. Helgerson — now conducting the videotapes review with the Justice Department — had already rankled covert officers with an investigation into the 2001 shooting down of a missionary plane by Peruvian military officers advised by the C.I.A. The investigation set off widespread concern within the clandestine branch that a day of reckoning could be coming for officers involved in the agency’s secret prison program. The Peru investigation often pitted Mr. Helgerson against Mr. Muller, who vigorously defended members of the clandestine branch and even lobbied the Justice Department to head off criminal charges in the matter, according to former intelligence officials

“Muller wanted to show the clandestine branch that he was looking out for them,” said John Radsan, who served as an assistant general counsel for the C.I.A. from 2002 to 2004. “And his aggressiveness on Peru was meant to prove to the operations people that they were protected on a lot of other programs, too.”

Mr. Helgerson completed his investigation of interrogations in April 2004, according to one person briefed on the still-secret report, which concluded that some of the C.I.A.’s techniques appeared to constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under the international Convention Against Torture. Current and former officials said the report did not explicitly state that the methods were torture.

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

The interrogation tapes were discussed at the meeting, and one Bush administration official said that, according to notes of the discussion, Mr. Bellinger advised the C.I.A. against destroying the tapes. The positions Mr. Gonzales and Mr. Addington took are unknown. One person familiar with the discussion said that in light of concerns raised in the inspector general’s report that agency officers could be legally liable for harsh interrogations, there was a view at the time among some administration lawyers that the tapes should be preserved.

Looking for Guidance

After Mr. Tenet and Mr. Muller left the C.I.A. in mid-2004, Mr. Rodriguez and other officials from the clandestine branch decided again to take up the tapes with the new chief at Langley, Mr. Goss, the former congressman.

Mr. Rodriguez had taken over the clandestine directorate in late 2004, and colleagues say Mr. Goss repeatedly emphasized to Mr. Rodriguez that he was expected to run operations without clearing every decision with superiors.

During a meeting in Mr. Goss’s office with Mr. Rodriguez, John A. Rizzo, who by then had replaced Mr. Muller as the agency’s top lawyer, told the new C.I.A. director that the clandestine branch wanted a firm decision about what to do with the tapes.

According to two people close to Mr. Goss, he advised against destroying the tapes, as he had in Congress, and told Mr. Rizzo and Mr. Rodriguez that he thought the tapes should be preserved at the overseas location. Apparently he did not explicitly prohibit the tapes’ destruction.

Yet in November 2005, Congress already was moving to outlaw “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment of prisoners, and The Washington Post reported that some C.I.A. prisoners were being held in Eastern Europe. As the agency scrambled to move the prisoners to new locations, Mr. Rodriguez and his aides decided to use their own authority to destroy the tapes, officials said.

One official who has spoken with Mr. Rodriguez said Mr. Rodriguez and his aides were concerned about protection of the C.I.A. officers on the tapes, from Al Qaeda, as the C.I.A. has stated, and from political pressure.

The tapes might visually identify as many as five or six people present for each interrogation — interrogators themselves, whom the agency now prefers to call “debriefers”; doctors or doctor’s assistants who monitored the prisoner’s medical state; and security officers, the official said. Some traveled regularly in and out of areas where Al Qaeda and other Islamist extremists are active, he said.

Apart from concerns about physical safety in the event of a leak, the official said, there was concern for the careers of officers shown on the tapes. “We didn’t want them to become political scapegoats,” he said.

According to several current and former officials, lawyers in the agency’s clandestine branch gave Mr. Rodriguez written guidance that he had the authority to destroy the tapes and that such a move would not be illegal.

One day in November 2005, Mr. Rodriguez sent a cable ordering the destruction of the recordings. Soon afterward, he notified both Mr. Goss and Mr. Rizzo, taking full responsibility for the decision.

Former intelligence officials said that Mr. Goss was unhappy about the news, in part because it was further evidence that as the C.I.A. director he was so weakened that his subordinates would directly reject his advice. Yet it appears that Mr. Rodriguez was never reprimanded. Nor is there evidence that Mr. Goss promptly notified Congress that the tapes were gone.

The investigations over the tapes frustrate some C.I.A. veterans, who say they believe that the agency is being unfairly blamed for policies of coercive interrogation approved at the top of the Bush administration and by some Congressional leaders. Intelligence officers are divided over the use of such methods as waterboarding. Some say the methods helped get information that prevented terrorist attacks. Others, like John C. Gannon, a former C.I.A. deputy director, say it was a tragic mistake for the administration to approve such methods.

Mr. Gannon said he thought the tapes became such an issue because they would have settled the legal debate over the harsh methods.

“To a spectator it would look like torture,” he said. “And torture is wrong.”

1 comment December 30th, 2007