WASHINGTON - The CIA acknowledged making videotapes to document interrogations of terrorism suspects that used techniques critics have denounced as torture, and said on Thursday it had destroyed the recordings.
Central Intelligence Agency Director Michael Hayden told employees in a letter that the videotapes were made in 2002 as part of a secret detention and interrogation program that began with the arrest of suspected al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaydah.
The taping was discontinued later that year and the tapes were destroyed in 2005, Hayden said.
"The tapes posed a serious security risk. Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al Qaeda and its sympathizers," Hayden said in the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Reuters.
He said he was discussing the program because of pending news reports on it. The New York Times published a story on the tapes on its Web site on Thursday.
The disclosure follows a separate instance last month involving a belated CIA acknowledgment that it possessed interrogation tapes sought in the trial of accused September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui.
Democrats in both the Senate and House of Representatives called for congressional investigations.
Sen. John Rockefeller of West Virginia, Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Congress did not learn about the tapes' destruction until November 2006 -- two months after the full panel was briefed on the interrogation program.
"While we were provided with very limited information about the existence of the tapes, we were not consulted on their usage nor the decision to destroy the tapes," Rockefeller said.
DESTRUCTION OF EVIDENCE
