US:The White House has describes as "pernicious" a report that the Bush administration may have misled the public about its involvement in the CIA's decision to destroy tapes showing the interrogation of terrorism suspects.
The New York Timesreported yesterday that at least four top White House lawyers discussed the tapes with the CIA between 2003 and 2005, when they were destroyed. The paper said that the involvement of former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales and his successor, Harriet Miers; former vice-presidential counsel David Addington; and former national security council lawyer John Bellinger indicated that the administration was more deeply implicated in the affair than officials have admitted until now.
The paper cites one former senior intelligence official "with direct knowledge of the matter" as saying there had been "vigorous sentiment" among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes.
"The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq," the paper said.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said yesterday that, apart from president George Bush's comment that he had not known about the tapes, White House officials have declined to discuss the matter because of pending investigations by the Department of Justice and the CIA inspector general.
"The New York Times'inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling," she said.
This week, a federal judge ordered a hearing into whether the tapes' destruction violated an order to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.
The tapes are believed to show "harsh interrogation techniques" - or torture - used on suspected terrorists who were held at secret prisons run by the CIA outside the US. The court hearing in the Guantánamo case, set for tomorrow in Washington, will be the first public forum in which officials submit to questioning about the tapes' destruction.
There is no publicly known connection between the 16 prisoners and the CIA videotapes, but lawyers contend that the government may have used information from the CIA interrogations to identify their clients as "unlawful combatants" and hold them at Guantánamo for as long as six years.
