More Tapes of Interrogations?

One more thing from today’s must-read New York Times piece. Mazzetti and Shane also report that a former CIA detainee claims to have seen cameras in his interrogation chamber. Although CIA Director Mike Hayden said “videotaping stopped in 2002” in his Thursday message to the CIA, the ex-detainee, Muhammad Bashmilah, was in CIA custody from 2004 to 2005.

The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization. He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released.

Meg Satterthwaite, a director of the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University who is representing Mr. Bashmilah in a lawsuit, said Mr. Bashmilah described cameras both in his cells and in interrogation rooms, some on tripods and some on the wall. She said his descriptions of his imprisonment, in hours of conversation in Yemen and by phone this year, were lucid and detailed.

Maybe Bashmilah is lying. Maybe he’s misremembering. But, to be blunt, why believe Hayden? The CIA lied for years about the existence of videotaped interrogations, so there’s no reason to credit Hayden’s account of when the recordings ceased.

What’s more, there’s sworn evidence to the contrary: in an October 25th court filing (pdf), U.S. attorneys Chuck Rosenberg, David Raskin and David Novak acknowledge recently learning of two currently-existing CIA interrogation tapes. Their letter is heavily redacted, so it’s unclear whether the tapes the attorneys viewed and listened to were made in 2002 but survived the 2005 destruction or were made sometime after 2002 — or even after 2005 — contrary to Hayden’s statement. What is clear is that we shouldn’t assume the CIA has accounted for every videotaped interrogation.