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We’ve heard CIA Director Michael Hayden’s confusing and risible explanation for why the CIA’s torture tapes were destroyed. And there have been a number of media accounts citing dozens of unanimous government officials that haven’t managed to shed much light. But today’s Washington Post provides about as clear of a narrative as we’re likely to get on why the tapes were made, when they were made, and why they were destroyed.

Here’s what they came up with: “the taping was conducted from August to December 2002 to demonstrate that interrogators were following the detailed rules set by lawyers and medical experts in Washington, and were not causing a detainee’s death.” CIA officials have also said that videotapes of the interrogations would have been very useful for reviewing what the detainees had said.

And here’s why they were destroyed, according to the Post. The Post broke news of the CIA’s black sites in November of 2005. That made CIA officials even more nervous that “the agency could be publicly shamed and that those involved in waterboarding and other extreme interrogation techniques would be hauled before a grand jury or a congressional inquiry.” At the same time, the station chief in Bangkok, who’d had the tapes in a safe in the U.S. Embassy compound there for three years, was retiring and “wanted to resolve the matter before he left.” So he sent a cable to CIA headquarters asking if he could destroy them.

The rest we know. Then-operations chief Jose Rodriguez checked with two CIA lawyers who said that the agency was not required to preserve them. Since no one in the administration had directly forbidden the destruction of the tapes, he went ahead and gave the station chief the go-ahead.

And no one seemed to be very upset after the deed was done: “Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.”

The Post also has more details on the Justice Department and White House discussions about the tapes:

The tapes were discussed with White House lawyers twice, according to a senior U.S. official. The first occasion was a meeting convened by Muller and senior lawyers of the White House and the Justice Department specifically to discuss their fate. The other discussion was described by one participant as “fleeting,” when the existence of the tapes came up during a spring 2004 meeting to discuss the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, the official said.

And can you tell who’s missing in this tally?

Those known to have counseled against the tapes’ destruction include John B. Bellinger III, while serving as the National Security Council’s top legal adviser; Harriet E. Miers, while serving as the top White House counsel; George J. Tenet, while serving as CIA director; Muller, while serving as the CIA’s general counsel; and John D. Negroponte, while serving as director of national intelligence.

If you said David Addington, Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, you were right. Alberto Gonzales is another notable exception. Although The New York Times has reported that Addington, who’s done so much to shape the administration’s torture policy, took part in discussions about the tapes, he somehow didn’t make the list here. The Times also cited a “former senior intelligence official” as saying that “there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.” But the official wouldn’t specify who that was. I think we might have our winners.

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