Judge orders hearing on destroyed CIA tapes

WASHINGTON — A federal judge in Washington on Tuesday ordered a court hearing to examine whether the CIA violated a judicial order by destroying videotapes showing harsh interrogation methods, rebuffing pleas from the Bush administration that he stay out of the matter while the executive-branch investigation proceeds.

The Justice Department had told U.S. District Judge Henry Kennedy he had no jurisdiction to inquire into the destruction of the tapes. It separately told lawmakers on Capitol Hill last week to delay public hearings on the tapes' destruction while the department's National Security Division and the CIA inspector general's office investigated.

Congress agreed not to hold hearings now, but Kennedy decided, without comment, to schedule a court hearing for Friday.

The dispute centers on hundreds of hours of CIA videotape showing coercive interrogation tactics used on two senior al-Qaida suspects in 2002: Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. CIA Director Michael Hayden and other officials said this month that the tapes had been destroyed to protect the identities of interrogators.

The tapes were destroyed in November 2005, intelligence officials said. In June 2005, Kennedy had ordered the government to preserve detention and interrogation records as part of a civil lawsuit by a group of detainees held at the military prison in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Destruction of the tapes has been raised by multiple lawyers as a possible obstruction of justice by the CIA that could interfere with efforts to determine whether some clients were tortured into making false admissions.

Lawyers for a man convicted of terrorism charges alongside al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla asked a federal judge in Miami on Tuesday, for example, to order the government to turn over any new information on Abu Zubaydah, who had helped identify Padilla to U.S. authorities.

The Justice Department declined to comment Tuesday on the judge's decision.

Also

In an interim ruling made public Tuesday, a military judge said Osama bin Laden's Yemeni driver, captured in Afghanistan, is entitled to consideration that he may be a prisoner of war, a status that would collapse his war-crimes trial at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, for a third time.

Navy Capt. Keith Allred, the judge, said in a decision dated Monday that he will next decide whether to declare Salim Ahmed Hamdan, 37, a POW.

His lawyers say the Bush administration got it wrong when it declared Hamdan first an "enemy combatant" and then a presumed "unlawful enemy combatant."

If Hamdan is declared a POW, his treatment would be subject to the Geneva Conventions, the international treaty that governs treatment of captives of war.

Material from The Miami Herald is included in this report.