Key omission in memo to destroy CIA terror tapes

[maddezmom]

Source: wapo

Monday, July 26, 2010; 3:18 AM

WASHINGTON -- When the CIA sent word in 2005 to destroy scores of videos showing waterboarding and other harsh interrogation tactics, there was an unusual omission in the carefully worded memo: the names of two agency lawyers.

~snip~

Interviews with current and former U.S. officials and others close to the investigation show that Rodriguez's order was at odds with years of directives from CIA lawyers and the White House. Rodriguez knew there would be political fallout for the decision, according to documents and interviews, so he sought a legal opinion in a way to gain needed legal cover to get the tapes destroyed - but not so much that anyone would stop him.

Leaving the lawyers he had consulted off his cabled order to destroy the tapes was so unusual that a top CIA official noted it in an internal e-mail just days later. The omission is now an important part of the Justice Department's 2 1/2-year investigation into whether destroying the tapes was a crime.


Prosecutors have focused on a little-used section of the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley accounting law. That makes it illegal to destroy documents, even if no court has ordered them kept and no investigator has asked for them.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/26/AR2010072600575.html

[Solly Mack]

1. K&R

[Demeter]

2. Very Important Development!

As long as people are digging it up, instead of burying it, the nation has a chance of surviving.

[Fumesucker]

3. The headline is misleading..

Those were not "terror tapes", they were "torture tapes".

Waterboarding is not a "harsh interrogation tactic" it is torture.

Not blaming the poster, the rules of LBN require using the original headline..

[babylonsister]

4. That's what the WaPo and NYT do; I agree with you. It'd be

really nice if they called them by their correct names.

[SkyDaddy7]

7. They do thing slike that because...

They honestly FEAR ridicule from FOX "News" & Talk Radio for being LIBERAL or UNAMERICAN! This is how the Right Wing Media controls this country!

[SpiralHawk]

6. Torture Tapes (R)

A record of Republicon Family War Crime Values in action.

[dipsydoodle]

10. ditto

aka sanitisation. :(

[xchrom]

5. Recommend

[pinboy3niner]

8. K&R

[dipsydoodle]

9. Odd in some respects

that Sarbanes-Oxley should prove to be so useful.

[MgtPA]

12. Maybe for the first time - like getting Capone on tax evasion.

[Soylent Brice]

11. K&R

[No Elephants]

13. We don't need no lawyer names. Yoo and Bybee have been exonerated. We won't even file a bar

association complaint against them.

[The Stranger]

14. Wow. Two and a half fucking years, and they still can't find a crime in this?

What a complete and total -- even Orwellian -- fraud.

Fuck it. There is no democracy any more.

[Iowa]

15. K&R