WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — White House and Justice Department officials, along with senior members of Congress, advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 against a plan to destroy hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the interrogations of two operatives of Al Qaeda, government officials said Friday.
The chief of the agency’s clandestine service nevertheless ordered their destruction in November 2005, taking the step without notifying even the C.I.A.’s own top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, who was angry at the decision, the officials said.
So now the fault here does not necessarily lie with a “Nixonian” White House nor even with Porter Goss, they guy who the CIA was undercutting pretty much the second he was named head of the agency, but with the head of the clandestine service who ran through all the stop signs the White House and Congress was throwing in front of him.
Why? I could think of a few reasons – some bad and some less bad – that would rage from the leftist knee-jerk “cover up” rationale all the way to a desire to protect his agents from prosecution since Congress had made it a point to leave interrogators hanging in the wind. Regardless, what Jose Rodriguez did was entirely and completely wrong. He stepped way out of his chain of command and took decision that weren’t his to take. Now, his actions are going to radically complicate a war on Islamism that ought to be crystal clear, in part because the President is goign to have to spend time fighting off the bulk of the Democrats and the folks who think, for reasons that are alien to me, that Constitutional rights should extend to those who are not Americans and who seek our destruction. We don’t have time for these silly bureaucratic games. We have a war to win.
UPDATE: Looks like the American people trust the CIA about as much as they trust the Democratic Congress, which is to say, about as far as they can pick them up and fling them.
