Criminal Investigation Opened Into CIA Tape Destruction - Updated
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation into the destruction of CIA interrogation videotapes and appointed an outside prosecutor to oversee the case, Attorney General Mukasey said today.
The CIA acknowledged last month that it destroyed videos of officers using tough interrogation methods while questioning two Al Qaeda suspects. The acknowledgment sparked a congressional inquiry and a preliminary investigation by Justice.
“The Department’s National Security Division has recommended, and I have concluded, that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter, and I have taken steps to begin that investigation,” Mr. Mukasey said in a statement released today.
Mr. Mukasey named a federal prosecutor in Connecticut, John Durham, to oversee the case. Mr. Durham has a reputation as one of the nation’s most relentless prosecutors. He served as an outside prosecutor overseeing an investigation into the FBI’s use of mob informants in Boston and helped send several Connecticut public officials to prison.
“The CIA will of course cooperate fully with this investigation as it has with the others into this matter,” an agency spokesman, Mark Mansfield, said.
The CIA’s inspector general, John Helgerson, who worked with the Justice Department on the preliminary inquiry, has recused himself from the investigation. Prosecutors from the Eastern District of Virginia, which includes the CIA’s headquarters in Langley, Va., are also recused.
Mr. Mukasey named Mr. Durham the acting U.S. attorney on the case, a designation the Justice Department frequently makes when top prosecutors are recused. He will not serve as a special prosecutor such as Patrick Fitzgerald, who operated autonomously while investigating the 2003 leak of a CIA operative’s identity.
The CIA has already agreed to open its files to congressional investigators, who have begun reviewing documents at the agency’s Virginia headquarters. The House Intelligence Committee has ordered the former CIA official who directed the tapes be destroyed, Jose Rodriguez, to appear at a hearing January 16.
Mr. Rodriguez’s attorney, Robert Bennett, had no comment.
(AP)
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It’s a shame we destroyed those tapes, would go good with a bowl of popcorn and beers.
Fuck ‘em, we can oversight after victory.
January 2nd, 2008 at 12:49 pmHow else are the lawyers/law firms who bought there way into the democrat party going to steal from the tax payers?
January 2nd, 2008 at 3:34 pmhttp://www.capitaleye.org/inside.asp?ID=320
So a bunch of paid liars is going to get to the bottom of it all huh? Going to drain the swamp again….only this time with a bunch of ambulemce chasing common-senseless ass lawyers?
And these idiots actually graduated from college? Dummy-U no doubt. Or perhaps they spent time in Cuba or Moscow studying their mentors Stalin, and Trotsky.
Damn dipshits.
January 2nd, 2008 at 5:25 pmThis is all about the liberals keeping “Bush is a lying Hitler” permanently in the news.
For 7 years “I hate Bush” is the core liberal message.
January 2nd, 2008 at 6:21 pmYou’d think in all that time, at least one these dim bulbs would come up with something else.