Judge Orders White House to Defend Itself on CIA Videos
Matt Apuzzo, AP
Afederal judge on Tuesday ordered the Bush administration to defend its decision to destroy videotapes of CIA interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects.
In a one-sentence order, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy rejected calls from the Justice Department to stay out of the matter and told lawyers to appear before him Friday at 11 a.m.
In June 2005, Kennedy ordered the administration to safeguard “all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay.”
Five months later, the CIA destroyed the interrogation videos. The recordings involved suspected terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The Justice Department argued that the videos weren’t covered by the order because the two men were being held in secret CIA prisons overseas, not at the Guantanamo Bay prison.
There’s new life in the accountability movement! The People v Bush: One Lawyer’s Campaign to Bring the President to Justice and the National Grassroots Movement She Encounters Along the Way (Chelsea Green) has just been published. Author Charlotte Dennett will be in Cambridge January 20 at the Harvard Bookstore at 7 pm to discuss it and the following day, January 21, at 7 p.m. in New York City at the 92nd St Y. Vincent Bulgiosi is flying all the way from the west coast and will join Naomi Wolf in helping her launch the book on the 21st.