A lawyer for a group of terrorism suspects held by the United States told a court yesterday that trusting the Justice Department with an inquiry into the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes would amount to putting the fox in charge of the hen house.
A Justice Department lawyer told the same hearing, however, that an independent court inquiry being requested by the suspects' lawyers could damage a joint investigation being carried out by his department and the CIA's inspector general.
David Remes, the lawyer for 11 Yemeni detainees at Guantanamo Bay, had asked District Judge Henry Kennedy for a legal probe to determine whether the CIA's action violated a 2005 court order to preserve evidence of detainee mistreatment at the naval base in Cuba.
"Why should the court not permit the Department of Justice to do just that?" Mr Kennedy replied at the hearing. The judge said he would issue a ruling later.
The CIA disclosed on December 6th that it destroyed hundreds of hours of tapes in 2005 showing the interrogation of two suspected al Qaeda suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The taped interrogations were believed to show a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding, which rights activists have condemned as torture. The CIA maintains that it destroyed the tapes lawfully to protect the agents involved in the interrogations.
News of the tapes' destruction prompted an outcry from human rights activists and Democrats in Congress as well as investigations by both the Bush administration and Congress. It was a further blow to the United States' international image, which had been damaged by the revelation of harsh treatment of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo.
At yesterday's court hearing, Justice Department lawyer Joseph Hunt described a court inquiry as "unwise and imprudent" and warned it could damage the joint Justice Department-CIA investigation.
Mr Hunt told Judge Kennedy that Justice Department officials would notify him if they found evidence that his court order had been violated. But Mr Remes urged the court to consider a broad inquiry into the US handling of interrogation records, saying there was no reason to believe officials had stopped at the CIA interrogation tapes.
"We have a smoking gun," said Mr Remes, who charged that the same Justice Department investigating the handling of the CIA tapes might also have sanctioned their destruction. "It's the classic case of the fox guarding the hen house," he said.
The Justice Department told Mr Kennedy that the al Qaeda suspects were not interrogated at Guantanamo Bay and should not be subject to the 2005 order. The transfer of the two al Qaeda suspects from secret CIA custody to Guantanamo Bay was announced in September 2006.
Former CIA official John Kiriakou told the US media last week that waterboarding was effective against Abu Zubaydah, a Palestinian accused of being a senior al Qaeda planner. But he also said he believed the technique was a form of torture. Mr Kiriakou is now being probed by the Justice Department, at the CIA's request, to determine whether he illegally disclosed classified information in remarks to the media, the Washington Postreported yesterday.
Neither the CIA nor Mr Kiriakou's attorney could confirm the Postreport.