Probe of tape loss sought

The spy agency destroyed the tapes in 2005.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Angry congressional Democrats demanded Friday that the Justice Department investigate why the CIA destroyed videotapes of the interrogation of two terrorism suspects.

The Senate’s No. 2 Democrat, Dick Durbin of Illinois, called on Attorney General Michael Mukasey to find out “whether CIA officials who destroyed these videotapes and withheld information about their existence from official proceedings violated the law.”

Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., accused the CIA of a cover-up. “We haven’t seen anything like this since the 181⁄2-minute gap in the tapes of President Richard Nixon,” he said in a Senate floor speech.

And Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., told reporters the CIA’s explanation that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identify of agents is “a pathetic excuse,” adding: “You’d have to burn every document at the CIA that has the identity of an agent on it under that theory.”

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee sent letters to CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden and Mukasey asking whether the Justice Department gave legal advice to the CIA on the destruction of the tapes, and whether it was planning an obstruction-of-justice investigation.

The spy agency destroyed the tapes in November 2005, at a time when human rights groups and lawyers for detainees were clamoring for information about the agency’s secret detention and interrogation program, and Congress and U.S. courts were debating where “enhanced interrogation” crossed the line into torture.

Also at that time, the Senate Intelligence Committee was asking whether the videotapes showed CIA interrogators were complying with interrogation guidelines.

The CIA refused twice in 2005 to provide the committee with its general counsel’s report on the tapes, according to Committee Chairman Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va.

Hayden told agency employees Thursday that the recordings were destroyed out of fear the tapes would leak and reveal the identities of interrogators.

He said the sessions were videotaped to provide an added layer of legal protection for interrogators using new, harsh methods. President Bush had just authorized those methods as a way to break down the defenses of recalcitrant prisoners.

Destruction of the tapes came in the midst of an intense national debate about how forcefully prisoners could be grilled to get them to talk.