When federal courts and the Sept. 11 Commission were investigating whether the CIA illegally tortured al-Qaida suspects, they demanded that the CIA turn over evidence of relevant conduct, including video tapes of interrogations if any existed. The CIA not only wrongly denied the existence of at least 92 such tapes. The chief of the agency’s clandestine service unit in 2005 also ordered the destruction of hundreds of hours of video tapes of the harsh interrogations of alleged al-Qaida ringleaders that it had left secreted away in Thailand, where the interrogations occurred in a secret prison in 2002.
Given these facts, which began to be revealed in 2004, it would seem obvious on its face that the CIA deliberately obstructed justice by destroying subpoenaed tapes of brutal interrogations that included waterboarding, which is deemed to be torture under an anti-torture treaty signed by the United States as well as by the Geneva Conventions and our nation’s own military code.
But the Justice Department apparently will not make that finding. I has condoned the antiseptic precautions that the Bush administration took early in the post-9/11 era to insulate itself from future prosecutions, and now finds its hands tied.
President Obama and his attorney general, Eric Holder, decided in their first year in office that the Justice Department would “not prosecute anyone who acted in good faith and within the scope of the legal guidance given by (the department’s) Office of Legal Counsel regarding the interrogation of detainees.”
Hence the special federal prosecutor charged with investigating the destruction of the tapes, John Durham, closed a three-year investigation into the matter by deciding Tuesday — the day the five-year statute of limitations for the case expired — that his office would not bring criminal charges against any of the CIA officers involved in destroying the tapes.