By Xinhua
Washington : Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Hayden is set on Tuesday to testify at Congress on the agency’s destruction of videotapes of interrogating terrorist suspects, reviving the debate over the torture issue.
Hayden is scheduled to offer his testimony at the two-day hearings behind closed doors at the Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees.
Hayden told CIA employees on Thursday that the tapes, which were made in 2002 during interrogation of two al-Qaida suspects, were destroyed three years later due to concerns on safety of interrogators and their families.
He also said that Congress was notified both of the tapes’ existence and CIA’s intent to destroy them.
However, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat, said that his committee found no mention of the tapes’ destruction in the transcript of a hearing in November 2006 where the CIA claims it informed Senate of that subject.
On the House floor, the intelligence committee said that until March 2007, it first learned the tapes had been destroyed, said Committee Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Democrat, adding Hayden’s claim that Congress was properly notified “does not appear to be true.”
The House committee have launched the investigation into the tapes and will also review the CIA interrogation techniques on terrorist suspects. Besides Hayden, some former CIA heads are likely to be called to testify at hearings too.
The Senate panel is also considering to conduct a separate review of the case.
The White House has been following counsels’ advice to mum on the episode before investigation is concluded, but spokeswoman Dana Perino Monday noted that President George W. Bush “has no recollection” of being informed of the tapes and their destruction before Thursday.
The destruction of the tapes was condemned by Bush’s Democratic critics and some human rights groups as an attempt to cover up interrogation practices such as “waterboarding” that were widely seen as torture.
Many Democrats and even some Republicans expressed skepticism about CIA claims that the tapes were destroyed only to protect the identity of the interrogators.
“There will be skepticism and cynicism all over the world about how we treat prisoners and whether we practice torture or not,” said Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain on Sunday.
Former CIA agent John Kiriakou who, who led the capture of a taped terrorist suspect, Abu Zubaydah, told ABC News on Monday night that waterboarding on Zubaydah pushed him to provide many intelligence clues leading to disruption of a number of attacks.
Although Kiriakou admitted that there was a sense of urgency in the intelligence community in obtaining information from terrorist suspects after Sept. 11 attacks, he did not entirely approve of harsh interrogation technique.
“We’re better than this. And we shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing,” he said.