General Hayden submits for our consideration that it was done to protect the identities of the interrogators.
This is incorrect. It is well within the technology of the day to obscure the faces and voices of the interrogators. Surely they sell the software at Circuit City.
The CIA knows this. And they know that everyone else knows this. Therefore, they knew that they would receive heat for insulting their audience's intelligence by claiming this excuse. ...And that is damning enough...
So, logically, the heat they expected to receive from a public viewing of the tapes far exceeded the heat they knew they would take for destroying them.
Those tapes contained a record of CIA behavior so morally reprehensible that their airing would destroy the CIA and open its employees up to charges of war crimes.
Now: If the ostensible purpose of "enhanced interrogation" is to extract information useful in the prosecution of the War on Globa Terra...
And if they destroyed all record of the extraction of that information...
Then their concern for their own safety eclipses their concern for the War on Globa Terra.
Not the height of courage, I'd say. ...Or maybe the War on Globa Terra isn't the pressing matter that it's represented to be...
The Bush Administration destroyed itself. The Justice Department destroyed itself. And now the CIA has destroyed itself. They all destroyed themselves by exposing a complete lack of moral authority.
When you lose moral authority --that is, when you lose the right to command without eliciting an involuntary bark of laughter-- you lose political authority. And through that loss, you lose legal authority.
And the United States exists because why? I'm not sure there's anything left that hasn't been laughed out of the room.
