Waterboard painting

Torture Museum; sandeep thukral

Even though the White House is stonewalling, the Senate Intelligence Committee held a closed session on the destruction of CIA interrogation tapes, and the complicit Rockefeller emerged to tell us . . . nothing, the intelligence community was leaking stories all over Washington that pointed fingers right into the White House. It looks like the CIA is not willing to take the fall for the President's torture policies.

First, over at No Quarter, Larry Johnson's intelligence friends leaked word that the CIA's recently retired Deputy Director of Operations, Jose Rodriquez, who reportedly authorized the destruction of the interrogation/torture tapes, did not act unilaterally: "He did check with both the IG and the DO’s assigned Assistant General Counsel before destroying the DO’s copies of the tapes." As Larry notes, the NYT article by Shane and Mazetti also reports the involvement of other CIA attorneys in the decision.

The chain of knowledge and approval then moves from the CIA directly into the Justice Department and the White House. We pick up the story from Dan Froomkin at washingtonpost.com:

John Kiriakou, who participated in the capture and questioning of the first al-Qaeda terrorist suspect to be waterboarded, also made clear that every decision leading to the torture of CIA detainees was documented and approved in cables to and from Washington.

Froomkin notes the ABC reports by Richard Esposito and Brian Ross in which Kiriakou described "a considerable paper trail":

Kiriakou: "The cable traffic back and forth was extremely specific. And the bottom line was these were very unusual authorities that the agency got after 9/11. No one wanted to mess them up. No one wanted to get in trouble by going overboard. So it was extremely deliberate."

Next, ThinkProgess carries Matt Lauer's interview yesterday with Kiriakou.

Lauer asked Kiriakou where the permission was given to carry out torture. “Was the White House involved in that decision?” Lauer asked. “Absolutely,” Kiriakou said, adding:

"This isn’t something done willy nilly. It’s not something that an agency officer just wakes up in the morning and decides he’s going to carry out an enhanced technique on a prisoner. This was a policy made at the White House, with concurrence from the National Security Council and Justice Department."

Then we get last night's Newsweek article by Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball, which Marcy Wheeler analyzes in this post. According to Newsweek:

The CIA repeatedly asked White House lawyer Harriet Miers over a two-year period for instructions regarding what to do with "very clinical" videotapes depicting the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques on two top Al Qaeda captives, according to former and current intelligence officials familiar with the communications (who requested anonymity when discussing the controversial issue).

[snip]

An extensive paper—or e-mail—trail exists documenting the contacts between Clandestine Service officials and top agency managers and between the CIA and the White House regarding what to do about the tapes, according to two former intelligence officials.

[snip]

Throughout the same period, said one of the former officials, a senior CIA lawyer, John Rizzo, now the agency's acting general counsel, was also conducting discussions on what to do with the tapes with White House lawyer Harriet Miers. Two sources said that Rizzo also discussed the issue with officials at the Justice Department, which had issued classified guidelines outlining how the CIA's interrogation program should operate.

As Marcy notes, we seem to have plenty of CIA sources telling public and private stories that link specific authorizations for torture directly to the White House, including repeated discussions with the President's personal counsel about destroying evidence, complete with paper and/or e-mail trails.

Why did the CIA constantly check with those closest to Bush? Newsweek:

The reason CIA officials involved the White House and Justice Department in discussions about the disposition of the tapes was that CIA officials viewed the CIA's terrorist interrogation and detention program—including the use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques—as having been imposed on the agency by the White House. "It was a political issue," said the former official, and therefore CIA officials believed that the decision as to what to do with the tapes should be made at a political level, by Miers—a former personal lawyer to President Bush and later White House staff secretary and counsel—or someone else directly representing the president.

For more on what spooked the spooks into destroying the recordings, read through Larry Johnson's post on "the Italian connection," and the comment thread at emptywheel on why the CIA might have concluded there was nowhere safe to hide the evidence.