His official reason for a clear obstruction of justice is the following in his Sixty Minutes interview:
Rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.
Stahl: Protect them from what?
Rodriguez: Protect them from Al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.
But it is routine for such tapes, as with photos, to be ruthlessly redacted and the faces of servicemembers or CIA agents blurred or blotted out before they even get near public view. So this is obviously untrue. The reason he destroyed them – even though they could have resolved permanently the specific elements of the torture authorized by Bush and Cheney – was, it seems to me, precisely because they would have shocked the world and shocked America.
When apologists for war crimes, like Mark Thiessen or Mike Mukasey, insist that American waterboarding was not like Khmer Rouge waterboarding, or that US stress positions were different than Chinese Communist stress positions, or that US use of hypothermia as a torture weapon was different than the Gestapo's, they can do so without any threat of being proven visually wrong. And visuals matter, as we found out at Abu Ghraib. But there we only saw still photos of prisoners being tortured along the precise lines laid out by Cheney; watching live-action tapes of waterboarding would have brought the reality of torture – and the rank incompetence and brutality of the torturers – into stark relief. It would have destroyed any remnants of Bush's and Cheney's reputation and America's moral standing in the world.
It would have forced the American people to realize that their leaders really were and are war criminals. And that would have serious legal implications for the lot of them. Scott Horton notes how Rodriguez, whose career was predominantly on the "dark side" in Latin America, must have been aware of how, over time, war criminals who left office with tight legal immunity ended up swamped by the physical and visual evidence of their crimes and the public turned on them:
Jose Rodriguez watched all of this happen. He would certainly appreciate the power of these historical precedents and the likelihood that the ninety-two tapes, if released, would come back to haunt him, and quite possibly send him to jail. That, I believe, is why he destroyed them.
Me too. But it is vital – vital – that we remember the many who resisted the torture program, from the FBI and the military to the CIA and the State Department. Few were as brave as Ali Soufan, a professional interrogator of terrorists who was shoved aside for the Cheney thugs to do their evil work – and then destroy the evidence of something they claim to be proud of. He just got the Ridenhour Prize. Here is a must-see extract from his speech in receiving it:
The war criminals are on notice. We won't forget. And we will bring you to justice one day – as history already has.
The Dish 