CIA Videos Predated Bush Legal Memo

CIA Videos Predated Bush Legal Memo

By Jason Leopold
April 11, 2009


The CIA began videotaping interrogations of two alleged “high value” terrorist detainees in April 2002, four months before Bush administration attorneys issued a memo clearing the way for CIA interrogators to use “enhanced interrogation techniques,” the Justice Department disclosed in court documents.

However, In a letter to a federal court judge Thursday, the Justice Department only agreed to provide details on the harshest interrogations of prisoner Abu Zubaydah that occurred in August 2002 – after the Bush administration's lawyers had provided the legal cover for waterboarding and other brutal tactics.

That letter prompted ACLU lawyers to express concern over why the government offered no promises regarding the preceding months. Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said the government’s “motivations in confining its {latest} response to the month of August are highly suspect.”

The ACLU is suing the CIA to release documents related to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the CIA in 2005 as public attention began focusing on allegations that the Bush administration had subjected “war on terror” detainees to brutal interrogations that crossed the line into torture.

Lev Dassin, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the government intends to provide the civil liberties organization “contemporaneous records that described the interrogations at issue … for the month of August 2002 (approximately 65 documents)."

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http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/041109a.html

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