The government on Monday revealed for the first time the number of videotapes destroyed in 2005 by the CIA, saying that agency officers destroyed 92 tapes documenting the harsh interrogations of two al-Qaeda suspects in CIA detention.
The disclosure came in a letter filed by federal prosecutors investigating the destruction of the tapes in November 2005.
It had been previously known that officials of the agency had destroyed hundreds of hours of videotaped interrogations, but the documents filed on Monday reveal the number of tapes.
The tapes had been held in a safe at the CIA station in Thailand, the country where two detainees — Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri — were interrogated.
The filing of the documents, submitted to a court in New York as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, came as federal prosecutors were wrapping up the investigation.
The criminal investigation, begun in January last year, is being led by John Durham, a career prosecutor from Connecticut with long experience trying organized-crime cases.
The order to destroy the tapes was given by Jose Rodriguez, who at the time was the head of the spy agency’s clandestine service.
Prosecutors have spent months trying to piece together whether anyone besides Rodriguez authorized the destruction and to decide whether anyone should be indicted.
The 92 videotapes were destroyed as Congress and the courts intensified their scrutiny of the agency’s detention and interrogation program.
The civil liberties union is asking a judge to hold the agency in contempt for destroying the tapes.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the matter on Monday.
The destroyed videotapes are thought to have depicted some of the harshest interrogation techniques used by the CIA during the two years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, including waterboarding.
In a speech on Monday in Washington, Attorney General Eric Holder said that “waterboarding is torture” and that he would never authorize the technique, a position he first articulated in his confirmation hearings.
Holder is leading a review on which interrogation techniques should be authorized for CIA use.
According to the letter that was filed, the agency has asked to have until Friday to produce a schedule for the court detailing when it will turn over a number of records associated with the destruction of the tapes, including a list of witnesses who might have viewed the videotapes before they were destroyed.
Durham has made no public statements about when he will conclude his investigation.
Last year, however, Durham asked that freedom-of-information requests directed at the agency be held in abeyance until he had wrapped up the criminal investigation into the tapes.
He asked at that time to have until the end of last month to conclude his work, and he has not asked for another extension.
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