Jose Rodriguez destroyed the torture tapes. I am sure he destroyed much more. He destroyed torture tapes as if that is standard practice for the USA and instead of sending him packing from the CIA and charging him with destroying government intelligence property, he is still appearing on FOX News to continue the lie.
...As you might recall, (click here) Judicial Watch pursued this FOIA because they thought they were going to catch Nancy Pelosi in a lie. (politics are used in the USA by the political right wing to confuse and distract from the truth)
After the torture memos were released, the torture apologists tried to claim that Congress had been briefed on–and had approved–of torture. But Pelosi pointed out that when CIA briefed her in September 2002, they did not tell her and Goss that CIA had already gotten into the torture business. In spite of the fact that that was completely consistent with Porter Goss’ tales of Congressional briefing, the press took Pelosi’s story as an accusation that the CIA had lied. So the right wing transparency group Judicial Watch FOIAed the records of Congressional briefings, with a focus on proving that Pelosi had lied about having been briefed about the torture that had already happened.
Perhaps in response to this hullabaloo, the CIA’s Inspector General started a review of Congressional–particularly Pelosi–briefings on June 2, 2009. After about six weeks of reviewing their documentation, they came to the following conclusion (starting on PDF 27):
- Pelosi was briefed on April 2002, before CIA started torturing Abu Zubaydah, and in September 2002, in the briefing under discussion.
- CIA’s own records regarding the September 4, 2002 briefing are so erroneous they show Jane Harman, not Pelosi, received the briefing.
- The only CIA record on the content of the September 4, 2002 briefing is the set of cables between Jose Rodriguez, (probably) Jonathan Fredman, and one other CTC person; this is the cable altered after the fact.
- People from the Directorate of Operations, and James Pavitt personally, repeatedly made claims about the content of the Pelosi briefing over the years, yet none of that sourced any first-hand knowledge or documentation.
That is, as is the case with CIA’s other briefings on torture, they have no fucking clue what they briefed to Pelosi.
Which leaves Pelosi and Goss’ consistent claim that CIA didn’t even tell them they had already waterboarded Abu Zubaydah 83 times by the time they briefed them.
