Durbin: What about Rendition Tapes?Since we’re talking about destroying tapes of interrogations, why limit it to those made in secret CIA prisons? The Chicago Tribune reports today that Abu Omar, a suspected terrorist abducted in Italy and flown to Egypt by the CIA, says that “his captors made audiotapes of his extensive interrogations in an Egyptian prison that recorded ‘the sounds of my torture and my cries.'”
That raises several questions, says Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), and he asked them in a flurry of letters today.
In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, he asks whether she knows if interrogations of detainees rendered by the United States to foreign countries were recorded, and if so, whether any have been reviewed “to verify compliance with diplomatic assurances not to torture detainees?”
In his letter to CIA Director Michael Hayden, he asks whether he knows of any such recordings and whether the CIA has any — and whether, well, they’ve already destroyed them.
And his letter to Attorney General Michael Mukasey requests that the Justice Department’s investigation into the destruction of the tapes include possible tapes of interrogations of rendered detainees — and they’re possible destruction.
