The prosecutor investigating the CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes has begun a broad review of whether government officials broke the law by concealing or destroying the tapes or violated court orders requiring the preservation of evidence, according to court papers filed late Friday night.
The seven-page declaration by the prosecutor, John Durham, gives the most detailed account to date of plans for his criminal investigation, involving hundreds of hours of video recordings of harsh interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. It gives no indication that his team intends, at least for now, to go beyond the tapes to examine whether the CIA's techniques violated the law.
“The investigation team is actively reviewing whether any person or persons obstructed justice, made false statements, or acted in contempt of courts or Congress in connection with the destruction of the videotapes,” Durham wrote.
He described the “central questions” for investigators as including “who within the federal government knew of the existence of the videotaped interrogations at issue; who was aware of the various orders that might have required the preservation of the videotapes; and who was involved in any way, in the decision and/or directive to destroy the videotapes.”
The prosecutor attached a table listing the 17 preservation orders, issued by judges overseeing 21 lawsuits filed on behalf of prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere. Eight of the orders were signed after the tapes were destroyed in November 2005, but Durham said he was looking into the possible violation of all those orders as well as court orders in “a number of federal criminal cases.”
One of the criminal cases likely to be at issue is that of Zacarias Moussaoui, who admitted plotting with al-Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and is serving a life sentence. Papers unsealed last week in Moussaoui's appeal suggest that his lawyers were seeking, and the government was supplying, information from the interrogation of Zubaydah at the very time the tapes were being destroyed. Neither the judge nor the prosecutors in the case appear to have been informed by the CIA of the existence of the tapes or their destruction.
