The Discerning Texan

The Times and the Democrats obviously want to portray the destruction of the waterboarding tapes as something that the Bush Administration initiated; but if you read the Times story, it seems more and more evident that it was individuals within the CIA itself that made the decision to destroy the tapes. The only question remaining is: why? Especially given the fact which has come out now that the Bush Administration recommended in 2003 that they not be destroyed. Captain Ed has more detail, but suffice it to say that this entire matter is beginning to emit a pungent odor of another attempted (and botched) Valerie Plame-like "gotcha" operation, whose target was the Bush Administratrion, and whose source lies squarely within the Agency itself:

The story of the CIA's tape destruction took another twist today. Earlier, Mark Mazzetti had written that the destruction of the tapes angered the CIA's legal counsel, John Rizzo. Today, Mazzetti and Scott Shane report that the CIA's attorneys gave permission to destroy the tapes of interrogations that included waterboarding:

Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.

The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the tapes’ destruction.

The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.

“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”

It sounds like a lot of double-talk, and it sounds as though all of it comes from the CIA. The agency asked for a legal opinion, and received it: don't destroy the tapes. One can spin it as one likes, but a "firm decision" doesn't require a "Hell, no." The CIA didn't like the answer it received and decided to ignore it.

The New York Times appears to have some problems reporting this story, too. How could John Rizzo get angered by a decision his team made? Mazzetti reported on Saturday that Rizzo knew nothing about the destruction of the tapes until afterwards, but now the Gray Lady says the lawyers concurred on the destruction beforehand. It's hard to believe that the CIA's attorneys would cut the chief counsel out of the decision loop.

Mazzetti and Shane say that this widens the scandal. It doesn't do that at all; if anything, it muddies it considerably. If the lawyers determined that the tapes should get destroyed, one presumes they had a reason to make that decision. It no longer looks like a rogue operation to obstruct justice, or at least looks a lot less like it, and more of the controlled, considered step the CIA claimed it was. It also still doesn't make this a "widening" scandal in an agency sense. It remains a CIA issue, especially since the Times makes it clear that Langley ignored White House counsel on this step.

The good Captain has more here. But this stinks to high heaven.

Meanwhile today's WSJ highlights the fact that Pelosi and the Dems knew about the interrogations and tapes five years ago. An excerpt:

After three days of screaming headlines about the CIA destroying videotapes in 2005 of the "harsh" interrogation of two terrorists, it now comes to light that in 2002 key members of Congress were fully briefed by the CIA about those interrogation techniques, including waterboarding. One member of that Congressional delegation was the future House Speaker, Nancy Pelosi.

The Washington Post on Sunday reported these series of briefings. While it is not our habit to promote the competition, readers should visit the Post's Web site and absorb this astonishing detail for themselves as reported by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen in "Hill Briefed on Waterboarding in 2002: In meetings, spy panels' chiefs did not protest, officials say."

Porter Goss, the former chair of the House Intelligence Committee who later served as CIA director from 2004 to 2006 is explicit about what happened in these meetings: "Among those being briefed, there was a pretty full understanding of what the CIA was doing. And the reaction in the room was not just approval, but encouragement."

In all, the CIA provided Congress with some 30 briefings on waterboarding before it became a public issue.