CIA 'planned destruction of interrogation tapes' in 2003

Washington: A key member of Congress has disclosed that the CIA said in February 2003 it planned to destroy videotapes of harsh interrogations after the agency's inspector general finished probing the episodes, an account that adds detail to recent CIA statements about the circumstances surrounding the tapes' destruction.

Representative Jane Harman, released a declassified copy of a letter she secretly wrote to the CIA in February 2003, in which she quoted then-CIA General Counsel Scott Muller as telling her a tape of the agency's interrogation of Zayn Al Abidin Mohammad Hussain, better known as Abu Zubaydah, "will be destroyed after the inspector general finishes his inquiry." The CIA confirmed Harman's account of Muller's statement.

Harman had recently become the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, and in her letter she urged Muller to "reconsider" that plan and predicted the tapes' destruction "would reflect badly on the agency."

Agency officials nonetheless destroyed the tapes in 2005, and on Wednesday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey ordered a formal criminal probe into the destruction.

In recent public accounts about the tapes, CIA officials have said that no definitive decision was made about destroying the tapes until 2005. Beginning in early 2003, senior officials expressed an "intention to dispose" of the videos, according to a December 6 statement by CIA Director Michael Hayden. But an internal debate over the tapes' disposition continued for another two years, with senior CIA lawyers advising against their destruction.

Detention sites

According to several senior intelligence officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the matter is under criminal investigation, the videotaping at issue was conducted at secret CIA detention sites overseas with the approval of CIA headquarters. The interrogations got underway after the administration in August 2002 authorised what Muller described in a February 28, 2003, letter to Harman as a "handful of specially approved interrogation techniques".

"As we informed both you and the leadership of the Intelligence Committees last September, a number of Executive branch lawyers including lawyers from the Department of Justice participated in a determination that, in the appropriate circumstances, use of these techniques is fully consistent with US law," Muller's letter said.