WASHINGTON — The House intelligence committee has summoned the CIA official who ordered the destruction of interrogation videotapes, launching what will probably be several months of hearings.
The panel wrote to CIA Director Michael Hayden on Thursday requesting that he send Jose Rodriguez, the agency’s former top spy, to a hearing Tuesday. Rodriguez retired from his role as head of the National Clandestine Service in August but is still at the agency preparing for retirement.
Hayden told CIA employees last week that the videotapes, made in 2002, showed the CIA’s interrogations of two terrorism suspects. The CIA destroyed the tapes in 2005. The tapes were made to document how CIA officers were using new, harsh questioning techniques that had been approved by the White House to force recalcitrant prisoners to talk.
The panel is also calling on acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo to testify. Central to the investigation is whether Rodriguez sought and got permission from agency lawyers to destroy the tapes.
The committee wants by today all cables, documents and legal opinions relating to the creation, retention and destruction of the videotapes.
At the same time, a member of the intelligence panel, Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., said he is introducing a bill that would require the CIA to videotape all of its interrogations and retain the tapes.
Holt, who also chairs the House Appropriations subcommittee on intelligence, was holding a closed hearing with Hayden to explore ways to increase congressional oversight of covert intelligence operations. It was Hayden’s third congressional briefing this week since word of the tapes broke.
Also on Thursday, a U.N. human-rights expert who recently visited Guantanamo Bay said that the destruction of CIA tapes supports suspicions that the agency used torture to gather information from terrorism suspects at the prison.
Martin Scheinin, the U.N. independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, also said he had reason to believe the CIA continues to use interrogation methods that violate international law.
“The destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations is one more argument that supports the contention that the CIA has been involved, and continues to be involved, in the use of interrogation techniques that violate the absolute prohibition against torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment,” he told reporters.
Scheinin did not explain how he reached this conclusion.
