Why Did The CIA Videotape Interrogations?

Although Jose Rodriguez might have felt he had good reason to destroy the CIA’s 2002 interrogation tapes, the destruction threatens to break the agency’s surprisingly sterling record of escaping prosecution for torture, so not many people would defend it as a wise move. But surely an even dumber move is the 2002 decision to videotape the interrogations in the first place.

Various explanations abound, but none of them are definitive — least of all CIA Director Mike Hayden’s.

Very little is known, and none of it for certain, about why the tapes ever existed. It’s astonishing that in 2002, CIA officials wouldn’t have realized the tapes were evidence of potential criminal conduct. Clearly they realized shortly thereafter, since the CIA spent years trying, and failing, to get outside legal authority to destroy them.

Last Thursday, Hayden ventured an explanation to CIA employees. Via Marty Lederman:

The tapes were meant chiefly as an additional, internal check on the program in its early stages. At one point, it was thought the tapes could serve as a backstop to guarantee that other methods of documenting the interrogations—and the crucial information they produce–were accurate and complete. The Agency soon determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes.

Notice that the second sentence contains a different rationale from the one offered in the first. In the second sentence, Hayden says that officials ordered the taping to ensure that the transcripts of the interrogations were accurate. Perhaps. But in the first, he cryptically refers to an “internal check” on an inchoate interrogation program — one of dubious legality — that began with Abu Zubaydah’s March 2002 capture.

What might that mean? On one reading, the tapes are there to ensure that the interrogators didn’t go beyond what the administration was authorizing, as a check on the interrogators themselves. Recording, then, has the added virtue of (if you’ll forgive the vulgarity) covering the CIA’s ass, a hallmark of George Tenet’s tenure as CIA director: they’d be able to say in internal administration discussions that Interrogator X didn’t do a thing that John Yoo, Jay Bybee et. al. didn’t say they can do. Yesterday’s Newsweek report from Mike Isikoff and Mark Hosenball provided that explanation.

They also provide another, one that Kevin Whitelaw runs down in U.S. News, that the tapes were made “in part to document [Abu Zubaydah’s] medical condition…

During the operation to capture him in 2002, Zubaydah was shot multiple times, including in the groin, and was treated by CIA medics.

“There were concerns that there be a record of his medical treatment and condition in the event that he died,” says one intelligence official.”

Though Hayden mentions — without elaboration — that Abu Zubaydah was “seriously wounded in a firefight,” he doesn’t link the videotaping to Abu Zubaydah’s health. It’s not inconceivable that the health issues prompted the videotaping: after all, the last thing CIA wants in a torture chamber is a dead body, as an interrogation of dubious legality could become a potential homicide. Documenting that the CIA didn’t kill Abu Zubaydah makes a certain amount of sense — certainly on the Cover Your Ass Principle.

But that still isn’t the explanation that Hayden offered. Hayden, of course, wasn’t part of CIA in 2002, and only found out about the tapes in 2006, when he was principle deputy director of national intelligence.

A real answer, if it ever comes, is going to have to come from George Tenet or one of his subordinates — maybe even someone who was in the chamber with Abu Zubaydah and made the decision on the spot. (That, of course, wouldn’t explain why al-Nashiri’s interrogation was videotaped, but still.) And that answer is surely only going to come when someone’s hand is on top of a Bible.