A Comment on CIA Videotape of Interrogations

Others, much more knowledgeable than I will discuss the CIA's destruction of the videotapes of interrogations of suspected terrorists in more than sufficient detail. I make one comment.

The New York Times today reports:

In his statement, General Hayden said the tapes were originally made to ensure that agency employees acted in accordance with “established legal and policy guidelines.” He said the agency stopped videotaping interrogations in 2002.

BBC News reports:

According to the intelligence agency, the tapes were destroyed to protect the identity of CIA agents and because they no longer had intelligence value.....

In the internal memo, Gen Hayden told staff that the CIA had begun taping interrogations as an internal check in 2002 and decided to delete the videos because they lacked any "legal or internal reason" to keep them.

It seems to me that interrogations should often be monitored by people outside the interrogation room, and with modern video techniques there is no reason that such monitoring should not be done in another city or another country. the monitor might be able to suggest things to the interrogator in real time to improve the interrogation. If you do a video of the interrogation, there seems to be no reason not to keep the visual information. I also suppose that later intelligence analysts would benefit from having videos of interrogations as they try to intrept the credibility and meaning of the testimony obtained in the interrogation. It also seems to me that there can be a lot of information in a video of an interrogation that the interrogators don't immediately recognize. Moreover, I would hope that the intelligence agencies are continuing to work hard to improve the technology that can be used to evaluate the performance and information provided by interrogation subjects (and interrogators); if so, later analysis of interrogation records might well yield additional information from the interrogation. Moreover, as I understand intelligence work, it involves putting together a picture from different sources. Later evidence from other sources may therefore lead analysts to reexamine evidence that they have previously studied, to find new meanings. Video records of interrogations would seem useful for that purpose.

One can hope that the CIA is simply keeping the video (and other data) from interrogations in another form, say on a hard disk or DVD rather than a tape. But if the CIA is not recording and keeping records of interrogations, perhaps it should reexamine that policy at least from the aspect of the value of doing so in the production of intelligence.