WASHINGTON, March 28 (UPI) -- The destruction of videotapes documenting harsh interrogations of alleged terrorists has raised questions about whether the CIA violated a federal court order.
In a suit brought by Hani Abdullah, a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a federal judge has raised the possibility that the U.S. spy agency violated a court order to preserve all evidence relevant to the prisoner by destroying the tapes, The New York Times reported Friday.
Lawyers for prisoners in at least a dozen other cases also filed challenges citing the CIA tapes' destruction, said David H. Remes, a Washington lawyer representing 16 prisoners.
The CIA disclosed four months ago it destroyed videotapes made in 2005 of interrogations of suspected terrorists using harsh methods. The destruction of the tapes has prompted criminal and congressional investigations, as well as the challenges in several major terrorism cases, and prisoners' legal claims that the CIA may have destroyed evidence, the Times reported.
"(Agency officials) thought they were saving themselves from legal scrutiny, as well as possible danger from al-Qaida if the tapes became public," said Frederick Hitz, a former CIA officer and the agency's inspector general from 1990-98. "Unknowingly, perhaps, they may have created even more problems for themselves."
