CIA Destroyed Tapes As Judge Sought Interrogation Data

The New York Times reports this morning that according to recently declassified documents, the federal judge overseeing the case of Abu Zubayday was still seeking CIA tapes of his interrogation even as the government had the recordings destroyed:
At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday. The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui's criminal trial.
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Meanwhile, the Associated Press is reporting that the prosecutor of Zacarias Moussaoui was aware that tapes of the interrogation had been destroyed almost year before the information was made public. The Justice Department informed him of the destruction even as he sought the death penalty for Moussaoui.
The lead prosecutor in the terror case against Zacarias Moussaoui may have known the CIA destroyed tapes of its interrogations of an al-Qaida suspect more than a year before the government acknowledged it to the court, newly unsealed documents indicate. The documents, which were declassified and released Wednesday by the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, detail efforts by Moussaoui's attorneys to send the case back to a lower federal court to find out whether the tapes should have been disclosed and whether they would have influenced his decision to plead guilty.
Read the article here.