Hearing on CIA Tapes Set for Friday

Looks like the Courts aren’t buying the Administration’s argument that only the Executive Branch should be looking into the CIA’s destruction of the torture tapes. Score one for checks and balances.

A federal judge on Tuesday ordered a hearing into whether the Central Intelligence Agency’s destruction of interrogation videotapes in 2005 violated his order that summer to preserve evidence in a lawsuit brought on behalf of 16 prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The hearing, set for Friday in Washington by District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., will be the first public forum in which government officials submit to questioning about the tapes’ destruction in November 2005. The Justice Department has asked Congress to postpone inquiries into the matter and had opposed a court hearing, saying any such actions would interfere with a preliminary investigation by the department and the Central Intelligence Agency into whether the destruction of the tapes violated the law.