There's a special place in hell for people who think like you, I suspect.

AQ detainees are different than say those soldiers in Iraqi army who surrendered in 2003. Iraqi soldiers met the GC tests as legitimate combatants.

Its really too bad we don't treat them as it is allowed under GC. The left insists on treating them as criminal suspects. If left wishes to treat them as POWs then we should simply place them in POW camp (Gitmo) and leave them. No need for trials. They stay till war is over. If it takes 40 years then too bad... Left can't keep claiming they are POWs and then insist they must have trials as a criminal.

In mean time I suspect any other tapes will be likewise sanitized

It's no accident that this administration is the most secretive in US history. It's no accident that the last 7 years have seen horrors revealed - only well after the fact and usually through unauthorized leaks.

I'm sure we've only seen the tip of the iceberg here and only after years of hard investigative work will we begin to realize the sludge that that's been kept secret for this period using classification.

“I’m really sick of this — OK, I’m angry about it,” Rockefeller said. “It’s a manipulation of the Congress — the use of two people of the Senate, two people out of the House, because nobody else can be told, including our committee. We can’t even talk to anybody, and they say, ‘Oh, they were briefed.’ ”

Rockefeller's lack of spine is legion, so please don't take this as a defense of him. But his point is no less valid for that. Effective oversight has to be severely restricted if it's treated as a black hole to dump information where it's not allowed out again.

Focussing on the performance of the few people in Congress (4 I think) who knew about the tapes misses the problem of an oversight structure designed to impede effective oversight. And, on a higher level, ignores the problem with a classification system that freely uses classification as a means to avoid public embarrassment and/or conceal criminal behavior.

The CIA’s entirely plausible explanation is that they destroyed the tapes for security reasons rather than to subvert the legal process.

The explanation seems totally implausible to me. The CIA has an enormous amount of classified information that would cause problems for its agents if the information were leaked. Based on the reason given here, all that information should be destroyed. It isn't, though, is it? I believe the tapes were destroyed because they were incontrovertible evidence of a crime being committed.

And I further agree with you that real opprobrium lies with the Republican majority that controlled the committee.

Which is why I was taking them to task myself. However, you really should save an extra heaping helping for the republican congressman who actually were responsible for this oversight and did nothing. Congress is as a second branch of government responsible for oversight. This is dereliction of duty and inexcusable. You really should have mentioned this...

It appears they didn't do much of anything, aside from Harmon expressing her view that maybe destroying the tapes wouldn't be the best idea in the world.

Sure, but what did the republicans do? Less than nothing. Again, castigate Harmon and Rockefeller - they deserve it. But surely those who did have the power and the responsibility deserve it even more. Who cares if the article simply mentions the democrats? That's a problem with the article which shouldn't be propagated...

It takes a special kind of sickness to support this kind of thing but destroy evidence of it, and that's what we've had for the past seven years.

James is, as a good republican, slanting his post to blame the democrats rather than the people who were actually in charge as is his wont. But Rockefeller and Harman were simply tools throughout all of this; enablers, if nothing else

Well, no. I'm naming those two because they are 1) the only ones quoted in the story and 2) the ones who were most likely to cry Foul. Lamentable as it may be, it's the opposition party, not the president's party, that's usually going to need to step up for something to happen.

Either 1) they didn't think that these tapes or their destruction was a big deal at the time or 2) they had an obligation to speak up. At the very least, they should have gone to the president and expressed their outrage. It appears they didn't do much of anything, aside from Harmon expressing her view that maybe destroying the tapes wouldn't be the best idea in the world.