Breaking news on the 'Skeeter Bites Report:
A letter by a Virginia-based U.S. attorney to a federal appeals court appears to contradict CIA Director Michael Hayden's public statements on the destruction of hundreds of hours of video footage of "extreme" interrogations of suspected al-Qaida operatives by strongly indicating that at least two of the videos still exist, The 'Skeeter Bites Report has learned.
Charles Rosenberg, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, wrote that his office viewed two videotapes of CIA interrogations of al-Qaida suspects as recently as September 19 and October 18 of this year -- contrary to Hayden's statement that the tapes were destroyed in 2005.
Disclosure of the continued existence of these two videos is almost certain to intensify the controversy over the tapes that were destroyed -- and accusations that the CIA is engaging in a cover-up of evidence that its operatives employed interrogation tactics outlawed as torture under both U.S. and international law.
Rosenberg's five-page letter, addressed to Judge Karen Williams, chief judge of the U.S. Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Virginia and to Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court in nearby Alexandria, was referring to the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui, the lone suspect convicted in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Brinkema was the presiding judge in the Moussaoui trial. A copy of the letter, dated October 27, was obtained by The 'Skeeter Bites Report.
Rosenberg wrote that his office was informed on September 13 by the CIA that the agency "obtained three recordings -- two videotapes and one short audiotape -- of interrogations" of suspected al-Qaida terrorists.
(More at the link.)
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