Opinion

GIVE HIM A MEDAL

JOSE A. Rodriguez Jr. is the man, according to recent press reports, who ordered the destruction of interrogation tapes made by the CIA. These allegedly show the effects of waterboarding and other “enhanced interrogation techniques” used against terrorists Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. In the next few months, Rodriguez’s name will likely be dragged through the mud; he’ll be vilified as a rogue official engaged in a massive cover-up.

I think he deserves a medal.

According to information that has leaked about the tapes, Rodriguez, then head of the agency’s clandestine operations, made the decision to destroy the videos in November ’05. The tapes themselves were made in ’02, months after 9/11.

Looking back, it’s very easy to condemn the extraordinary measures our government took to try to save lives in the wake of 9/11. A collective amnesia seems to have set in on what conditions were like in ’02 when those CIA interrogations took place.

Most Americans fully expected that the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon were just the beginning of a terrorist war on American civilians. After all, we were being told by nearly everyone in a position to know that the question was not if we would suffer another major terrorist attack, but when.

By the time the CIA interrogated Zubaydah and al-Nashiri, the East Coast had been hit not only on 9/11 but by a series of anthrax attacks. Sniper John Allen Muhammad, a convert to the Nation of Islam, and his sidekick, Lee Boyd Malvo, had also gunned down 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area.

So what exactly did we expect the CIA to do when it captured high-level al Qaeda operatives? Read them their Miranda rights, provide them with free lawyers and place them in a cell with cable TV?

We don’t know exactly what the captured operatives told interrogators – thankfully – but we do know that there hasn’t been another al Qaeda attack here in more than six years. We also know that congressional leaders, at least initially, made no objections to the use of waterboarding when informed about it in September ’02.

And, by the time Rodriguez reportedly gave instructions to destroy the CIA tapes, America’s reputation had been severely damaged by the release of other tapes entirely unconnected to the CIA’s or any U.S. efforts to obtain intelligence from captured prisoners. In April 2004, CBS’s newsmagazine “60 Minutes” had aired a handful of inflammatory videos made by out-of-control, low-level US military guards at Abu Ghraib prison.

It’s difficult to imagine what harm might have come from the release of the CIA interrogation tapes – but there’s no doubt that had they continued to exist, at some point they would’ve become public. The release would have jeopardized sources and methods used by the CIA, the most serious category of risk to American intelligence. It might have led to assassinations of CIA operatives, greater risk for our captured soldiers and hand-wringing by our putative allies.

Rodriguez’s lawyer says that his client sought and received legal clearance to destroy the tapes. Even though he’s likely to become a scapegoat, what he did was right. He protected not just his men but all of us. I, for one, thank him.