WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday ordered a court hearing Friday to examine whether the CIA violated a judicial order by destroying videotapes showing harsh interrogation methods.
The Justice Department had told U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. earlier that he had no jurisdiction to inquire into the destruction of the tapes. It separately told lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week to delay public hearings on the tapes’ destruction while the department’s National Security Division and the CIA inspector general’s office conducted their probe.
Congress agreed not to hold hearings now, but Kennedy decided to schedule the court hearing.
The dispute centers on hundreds of hours of CIA videotape showing coercive interrogation tactics used on two senior al-Qaida suspects in 2002, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. CIA Director Michael Hayden and other officials said earlier this month that the tapes had been destroyed to protect the identities of interrogators.
The tapes were destroyed in November 2005, intelligence officials said. In June of that year, Kennedy had ordered the government to preserve detention and interrogation records as part of an ongoing civil lawsuit by a group of detainees held at the military prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Justice Department contends the tapes weren’t covered by the order because the two men were held in secret CIA prisons overseas, not at Guantanamo Bay.
The lawsuit is only one of several cases in which courts have ordered the government to preserve documents or other records related to interrogations. The destruction of the tapes has been raised by multiple lawyers as a possible obstruction of justice by the CIA that could interfere with efforts to determine whether some clients were tortured into making false admissions.
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