A 21-Hour CIA Videotape Gap
The CIA has already copped to destroying videotapes in 2005 that detail brutal interrogations. All in all, as the American Civil Liberties Union forced the CIA to identify 92 destroyed tapes. That destruction warranted the empanelment of a special prosecutor, John Durham, whose brief Attorney General Eric Holder has now expanded to cover the torture of “certain detainees.”
But the just-released CIA inspector general’s report on torture reveals more extensive prima facie destruction of evidence. The inspector general’s office “identified 83 waterboard applications, most of which lasted less than 10 seconds,” the document reads, despite at least 183 more sessions occurring. What happened when the inspector general’s office reviewed “videotapes, logs, and cables” relating to the torture?
“„OIG [the Office of the Inspector General] found 11 interrogation videotapes to be blank. Two others were blank except for one or two minutes of recording. Two others were broken and could not be reviewed. OIG compared the videotapes to [REDACTED] logs and cables and identified a 21-hour period of time, which included two waterboard sessions, that was not captured on the videotapes.
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