There is much that does not make sense about the destruction of the CIA videotapes of the interrogation of at least two Al-Qaeda suspects in the year after the 9/11 attacks. For a start, the agency originally insisted the tapes did not exist. Now it has admitted that this was a lie but has gone on to say the recordings have been destroyed. The record was made, says the CIA, to ensure that the new harsher interrogation methods authorized by the Bush White House were within “legal limits.” Why then was crucial evidence that this was the case subsequently destroyed? Unless of course the pictures showed that the techniques used to extract information from the suspects were indeed beyond the “legal limits.”

The other excuse advanced by the CIA that the videotapes were destroyed in 2005 to protect the identities of CIA operatives is clearly also odd. If the spy agency had been faced with a demand for the release of these recordings, it would have been the work of only a few hours to disguise the features of the interrogators by electronically doctoring their faces while still showing what actually went on during the examinations. What appears far more likely is that the tapes were destroyed since they represented damning evidence of abuse and torture against identifiable CIA agents. In particular it is reported that the pictures showed at least one suspect being subjected to “waterboarding,” a torture in which a prisoner is almost drowned.

During the 2006 trial of Zacarias Moussaoui who was picked up a month before 9/11 and convicted of being one of the plotters, his defense team sought access to any videotapes of terror suspect interrogations. It was then that the CIA denied that such tapes existed. This would seem to have been an obstruction of justice. If the agency then destroyed the tapes in case they were forced by the courts to hand them over, the crime is compounded. In 2005 Moussaoui’s lawyers were trying to build their client’s defense. That this seems to be the moment when the tapes were trashed may be no coincidence. The tapes themselves are not, however, the real issue which is that President Bush in moving to protect the American people from terror assault was prepared to authorize behavior that flies in the face of all the freedoms and values that Americans supposedly hold dear. Time and again in this administration’s baleful seven years of blunder, the White House has been prepared to order illegal and immoral treatment of prisoners.

There will of course always be a few individual sadists in any country who will mistreat suspects. Nonetheless, the depravities of Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay and the extraordinary CIA rendition campaign and the torture of those it believed to be terrorists, could not have occurred so extensively without active encouragement from the highest levels in Washington. Angry Democrats are focusing wrongly on the cover up of the videotapes. But perhaps they cannot bring themselves to accept the horrific truth that men have been brutalized and tortured in the name of America.