The CIA videotaped interrogations of two top terror suspects and destroyed the tapes three years later for fear they would be leaked and compromise the identities of US questioners, the director of the agency told employees.
Disclosure of the 2002 interrogation and subsequent destruction brought immediate condemnation from Congress and from a human rights group that charged the spy agency's action amounted to criminal destruction of evidence.
CIA Director Michael Hayden said the CIA began taping the interrogations as an internal check on the program after US President George W. Bush authorized the use of harsh questioning methods. The methods included waterboarding, which simulates drowning, government officials said.
"The agency was determined that it proceed in accord with established legal and policy guidelines. So, on its own, CIA began to videotape interrogations," Hayden said in a written message to CIA employees, obtained by The Associated Press on Thursday.
The CIA decided to destroy the tapes in "the absence of any legal or internal reason to keep them," Hayden wrote.
"The tapes posed a serious security risk," Hayden wrote. "Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program."
Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogations were legal.
Representative Jane Harman, then the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, was one of only four members of Congress in 2003 informed of the tapes' existence and the CIA's intention to destroy them.
"I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it," Harman said.
While certain lawmakers were briefed on the CIA's tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency destroyed them, two congressional officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity.
Jennifer Daskal, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch, said destroying the tapes was illegal.
"Basically this is destruction of evidence," she said, calling Hayden's explanation that the tapes were destroyed to protect CIA identities "disingenuous."
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