The CIA, the world’s most powerful terrorist organization, has destroyed interrogation tapes from 2002 using the universal authoritarian answer as their excuse – that the tapes were a threat to security. Director Michael Hayden (seen here doing a sub-par imitation of a black panther) said that the tapes documenting the interrogations of two terror suspects were destroyed in 2005 to protect the identities of the “questioners”.

But don’t overreact and think that there wasn’t any oversight. Hayden says the CIA’s own internal watchdog reviewed the tapes a year after they were made and said everything done was legal. Having found out that the CIA approved of everything the CIA had done; Hayden made plans to have the tapes destroyed. They eventually were destroyed in the same year that the scandal over torture at Abu Ghraib surfaced.

Hayden also said that House and Senate intelligence committee leaders had been informed of the tapes and the CIA’s intention to destroy them. In total, only four congress members were made aware of the tapes in 2003. One of those people was Rep. Jane Harman of CA who said, “I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it.”

President Bush said publicly that it was the harsh “questioning” of the first terror suspect in these tapes which forced the detainee into naming the second suspect in the following tape as a fellow 9/11 accomplice. The destruction of the tapes is now bringing condemnation from Capitol Hill and human rights groups. Jennifer Daskal, senior counsel with Human Rights Watch, called Hayden’s explanation “disingenuous” and stated that, “Basically this is destruction of evidence.”

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