Hayden: “We Could Have Done an Awful Lot Better”What a difference a scandal makes. Coming out of his briefing to the House intelligence committee today, CIA Director Michael Hayden was penitent: “particularly at the time of the destruction we could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alerted and informed.”
It’s a markedly different tone from the one he took last week. Then, he released a statement about the tapes’ destruction and claimed that the intelligence committees had received ample notification of the intention to destroy the tapes and then their actual destruction. Both committees said that wasn’t true. Now he apparently agrees.
Today was the second of Hayden’s initial briefings on the scandal. Yesterday’s was to the Senate intelligence committee, where he said that even though he’s in charge at the CIA, he’s not really the guy to be talking to: “Other people in the agency know about this far better than I.” Hayden says he learned of the tapes’ destruction as far back as last year, when he was the principal deputy director of national intelligence and before he took over at the CIA in May of 2006.
Accordingly, Senate intelligence committee Chair Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) says that former CIA General Counsel John Rizzo and current General Counsel John Helgerson will testify in the next week. Jose Rodriguez, who decided to destroy the tapes, will also be up.
The same people will likely appear before the House committee. Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-TX) says that Hayden’s testimony today was “just the first step in what we feel is going to be a long-term investigation.” So there’s plenty of apologizing left to do.
