The Judiciary Committee report and the destroyed CIA videotapes

 --Last week the House Judiciary Committee released its overview report on abuses of executive power in the Bush administration, as posted previously. The 500+-page report deals fairly concisely with some grave issues, all of which are still alive as issues. Among these is the matter of the destroyed CIA videotapes—now determined to total at least 92. Recent court filings also indicate that there are some 3,000 documents, including notes, relating to the CIA videotapes. Even if not one copy of a single tape ever surfaces, public record shows that a substantial body of evidence about the tapes exists.

Judiciary, chaired by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), held several hearings during the Bush years about detention and the treatment of detainees including torture. On Dec. 20, 2007, the Committee held a hearing on the destroyed CIA videotapes (previous post).

Contravening its typical defensiveness in face of criticism--varying from the usual posture of having at least one minor official show up to present the counterintuitive side of the argument--the previous administration did not send representatives to the tapes hearing. From the report: “That hearing focused on the possible legal liability related to conduct depicted on interrogation tapes and destruction of the tapes. Despite repeated invitations, the Department of Justice did not appear at the hearing.”

The Committee report argues that preventing review was a motive for the non-appearance: “the apparent purpose for the destruction of tapes was to prevent any review–by any judicial tribunal or Congress–of the interrogation techniques depicted on those tapes, which reportedly included waterboarding.”

There also remains, however, the obvious possibility that another motive was concealing culpability. Both detainees mentioned as being portrayed on the videotapes, Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Nashiri, were identified by intelligence sources in the previous administration as connected with the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. The history of their capture and detention as well as of their actions before capture is consistently connected with the nation of Yemen.

In this context, a recent Washington Post article on Zubaydah, laudably debunks torture as a means of obtaining information. The thesis of the article, “Detainee’s harsh treatment foiled no plots,” is surely sound. Torture is basically just the vilest of governmental abuses, an intelligence scam that should be seen through by every thinking person.

But the article does not mention the Cole, or Yemen, and the revisionist accounts of Zubaydah’s newly discovered (apparently) worthlessness for intelligence purposes come from unnamed sources. The sources focus only on foiling future plots—rather than on some possibility of discovering information about plots already carried out, such as the Cole bombing. This is not to be misconstrued as an argument for torturing that information out of Zubaydah. But somehow a prisoner touted for several years as a high-value captive, and several times linked with the Cole, is now being re-represented as . . . somebody we again do not need to hear from, but this time for different reasons than those advanced by the Bush administration.

It would be valuable to read those notes about the CIA videotapes, to see not only the practices used on the prisoners, but also the personnel involved, including officials of any government, and including private contractors as well as military personnel. As this weblog inquired before, who else was on those videotapes besides the prisoners? The government of Yemen has much to tell us.

The notion that the United States might be unwilling to pursue justice in regard to torturers makes all Americans less safe around the world.

As Judiciary concludes the section on CIA videotapes, “Chairman Conyers called for Attorney General Mukasey to appoint a truly independent special prosecutor to investigate this matter, and to investigate harsh interrogation methods generally. While Mr. Mukasey did appoint a Department employee to investigate the matter, he refused to appoint an independent prosecutor under the relevant DOJ regulations. That investigation remains ongoing.”