CIA Official Destroyed Torture Tapes to Protect Subordinates, Say Buddies

[babylonsister]

CIA Official Destroyed Torture Tapes to Protect Subordinates, Say Buddies
By Spencer Ackerman - December 10, 2007, 11:40AM

Top-tier intelligence reporter Siobhan Gorman, now at the Wall Street Journal, profiles Jose Rodriguez, the outgoing CIA operations chief who in 2005 reportedly ordered the destruction of the CIA's interrogation videotapes. In doing so, she talked to a number of former intelligence officials familiar with Rodriguez. To raise the curtain for you, dear reader, oftentimes active-duty CIA officials use their retired colleagues on the outside to communicate information to reporters that their active status prevents them from discussing. I obviously can't know if that's at play in this case. But here's how some former officials explained Rodriguez's motivations in destroying the tapes:

Mr. Rodriguez had long been concerned that the CIA lacked a long-term plan for handling interrogations, they say. He also worried, given the response to Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, and an earlier agency scandal involving the shooting-down of a plane that turned out to be carrying Peruvian missionaries, that lower-level officers would take the fall if the videos became public, the former colleagues said.

One former official said interrogators' faces were visible on at least one video, as were those of more senior officers who happened to be visiting. He said Mr. Rodriguez was concerned that "they were carrying out the direction from higher-ups in the administration, yet the people who would end up getting in trouble are going to be some GS-12s," referring to a midlevel rank in the federal bureaucracy.

"Jose was concerned about how all this would end," another former senior intelligence official said. "He wasn't getting instructions from anybody."

Note first, as Gorman does, that this explanation conflicts with that of CIA Director Mike Hayden. In disclosing the destruction of the tapes, Hayden said in a statement Thursday, rather implausibly, that the tapes needed to be destroyed because their potential disclosure could leave CIA interrogators open to retribution from al-Qaeda. Hayden will go to the Senate intelligence committee tomorrow to answer (or not) lawmakers' questions on the tapes' destruction. The hearing will be closed to the public.

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[Solly Mack]

1. Now that everyone - and their dogs - is admitting that the government tortures

can we now - finally - prosecute people for war crimes?


I didn't think so...

[spanone]

2. that's called a crime. obstruction of justice....remember justice? pre bu$h* we had it

[seemslikeadream]

3. more senior officers

who happened to be visiting

[L. Coyote]

4. Bring on the SPIN. The opposite is the case, no doubt.

Protect the President. That is what is going on. Cover up Bush's crimes and his lies. They were "carrying out the direction from higher-ups in the administration" and therein lies the problem. This was evidence of their crimes.

The problem is never that lower-level workers will be found culpable.

Now, given they are SPINNING one must ask, what is the exact opposite of this spin, ""He wasn't getting instructions from anybody."

Obviously, he was getting instructions from somebody up the chain of command! That, my friends, would be George W. Bush.

You see, the irony of this all is that the man who was saying the US does not torture is the man who had the evidence, knew he was lying, and destroyed the evidence. It is that SIMPLE and it is soooo obvious.

[terisan]

5. They could have edited tapes to achieve their ends. Is their anything in govt not totally corrupted?

It is so obvious a lie. This is the age of photoshop.

Is it true that once the Roman emperors took over, Romans could no longer take pride in their increasingly-corrupted government, stopped working to maintain it, and let the whole barrel of now rotten apples, decay.

When the US stopped backing up its paper money with gold, and then stopped backing it with silver: the argument was that faith in the American dollar did not need to be in hard metals because it was in our worth as a people, a nation, and in our economic might.

Note the dropping dollar.

Perhaps the theory that Bush is trying to destroy America is correct. The multinationals probably don't care--because they are truly multinationals---like Halliburton they can milk the US taxpapers, bankrupt our country by enriching themselves, and then just set up headquarter in Dubai (as they have already done).

Which country is going to own us? China? Canada? Saudi Arabia? a European consortium?

[Bitwit1234]

6. One of the guests on MSNBC said that was a fabrication

he said, and it makes sense, that if you have to destroy one tape, to protect the agents on that tape, then you would have to destroy ever tape, word etc pertaining to any agent. Because that agent would be in the same boat as these CIA agents. He is correct. It is a ploy so they wouldn't get caught.