CIA may have more interrogation tapes, detainee's lawyer suggests

[MiaCulpa]

White House tacitly approved destruction of CIA waterboarding tapes, former official says

Contrary to the official CIA line, the lawyer for a captured prisoner revealed that her client reported seeing videocameras in interrogation rooms and on the wall of the prison in 2003 -- a year after the CIA said interrogations had stopped, suggesting there may be yet more tapes.

"The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization," the New York Times reported Tuesday. "He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released."

"Meg Satterthwaite, a director of the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University who is representing Mr. Bashmilah in a lawsuit, said Mr. Bashmilah described cameras both in his cells and in interrogation rooms, some on tripods and some on the wall," the paper added. She said his descriptions of his imprisonment, in hours of conversation in Yemen and by phone this year, were lucid and detailed.

This comes in contrast to a statement from CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, who told agency employees in a message Tuesday that “videotaping stopped in 2002,” after officials “determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes.”

Full article here:

http://rawstory.com/news/2007/White_House_tacitly_approved_destruction_of_1211.html