This scandal has gotten far too little attention this week, but Scott Horton at Harper's is on the ball:
In a letter to the federal judge overseeing Freedom of Information Act litigation in New York, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin drops a bombshell. The CIA purposefully destroyed nearly 100 tapes of interrogation sessions involving prisoners in its custody.
He goes on to observe that "Torture is a criminal act, and the tapes most likely captured evidence of crimes:"
There is one inescapable conclusion to draw from the destruction of evidence here: those who destroyed it fully appreciated it could be offered up as evidence of crimes in which they were implicated in a future prosecution.
At FDL, emptywheel asks "Who Watched the Torture Tapes?" and speculates that "we may get the names of other people (I'm curious whether Cheney, David Addington, or John Yoo might be among them) who had viewed the torture tapes."
The ACLU's press release is here.
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