the citizen-viewer

In case the citizen-viewers have been inattentive today, the CIA has admitted (ahead of a New York Times article) destroying hundreds of hours of tapes of their interrogation of suspected Al Qaeda operatives they held.

The CIA’s defenders are claiming that the tapes were destroyed to protect the identities — and the safety — of the interrogators. If the CIA is incapable of blurring the perpetrator’s faces on the tape, then we’re paying them way too much.

No, the real reason is pretty obvious. They didn’t want somebody to see the ugly, illegal, inhuman acts they were committing. Because even the ravening mobs out there, the listeners to Bill O’Reilly, the watchers of Rush Limbaugh, might be disgusted — many of them anyway — by the actual sight of a human being jerking helplessly as he feels himself drowning, helpless in the grip of his torturers. His American torturers.

So they destroyed the tapes.

The operative concept here is a legal one, omnia praesumuntur contra spoliatorem. It means “all things are presumed against the wrongdoer,” and is applied in cases where evidence is destroyed. It is assumed that those destroy evidence are those who know that the evidence would incriminate them.

President Bush’s spokesperson says that Bush can’t recall if he was told that the tapes would be destroyed and doesn’t remember if he saw them. If he had any interest in the question, he would find out, and if someone failed to tell him, he would have their head.

But that kind of accountability has never been demonstrated by this administration. Instead, they have the heads of people like acting Assistant Attorney General Daniel Levin, who had himself waterboarded to see whether it was torture or not — and the law into the hands of people like Michael Mukasey, who said he didn’t know if it was or not.

Now he will never see those tapes. For him, and for the mobs, the torture we are guilty of committing will remain an abstraction. The screams will echo only within the walls of the CIA’s torture chambers, and in the broken psyches of the human beings that suffer by our hand.