WASHINGTON — The CIA got rid of 92 videotapes depicting the harsh interrogations and confinement of “high value” al-Qaeda suspects, government lawyers disclosed Monday, as a long-running criminal probe of the tapes’ destruction inched toward a conclusion that is not expected to result in charges against CIA operations employees, three sources said.
Then-directorate of operations chief Jose Rodriguez gave an order to destroy the recordings in November 2005, as scrutiny of the CIA and its treatment of terrorism suspects intensified. Then-CIA director Michael Hayden argued that the tapes posed “a serious security risk” because they contained the identities of CIA participants in al-Qaeda interrogations. Until Monday, the exact number of destroyed tapes was not known. Agency officials have said they stopped taping detainees six years ago.
Federal prosecutor John Durham, appointed last year to investigate why the tapes were destroyed and whether any court directives were violated, has nearly completed formal interviews with all the key characters. Rodriguez has not yet been questioned, according to sources who have followed the case.
Durham appears unlikely to secure criminal indictments against Rodriguez and other agency-operations personnel involved in the conduct, the sources said. In recent months, the prosecutor has focused special attention on CIA legal advisers who reviewed court directives and on agency lawyers who told Rodriguez that getting rid of the recordings was sloppy and unwise but that it did not amount to a clear violation of the law, the sources said.
Durham has obtained internal e-mail messages and memos that detail the sometimes jarring or unpleasant substance of the interrogations chronicled on the destroyed tapes, they added.
At issue are recordings that chronicle the interrogation of two senior al-Qaeda members, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, better known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, while they underwent a simulated drowning practice known as waterboarding and in less hostile moments as they interacted with agency employees or sat in their prison cells, according to government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the materials remain classified.
Human-rights advocates and public-interest groups pressed for more details and demanded that the CIA be sanctioned.
“The sheer number of tapes at issue demonstrates that this destruction was not an accident,” said Amrit Singh, a staff lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union. “There was a deliberate attempt to destroy evidence of what we believe to be illegal conduct.”
