Destroyed CIA tapes will undermine trials: lawyer

By Mark Trevelyan, Security Correspondent

LONDON (Reuters) - The CIA's admission that it filmed the interrogation of terrorism suspects and then destroyed the tapes will wreck the chances of convicting them, a lawyer representing Guantanamo Bay prisoners said on Friday.

"First, it's a criminal offence to destroy evidence," said Clive Stafford Smith, head of British-based legal charity Reprieve.

"Second, if you do, the American case law is quite clear: the charges get dismissed against the individual if it's evidence that would have helped the defense," he told Reuters.

The Central Intelligence Agency this week acknowledged making video recordings of the interrogation of terrorism suspects using techniques that critics have denounced as torture -- a description that the U.S. government rejects.

CIA director Michael Hayden said the videos were made in 2002 but destroyed in 2005 because they posed a security risk.

"Were they ever to leak, they would permit identification of your CIA colleagues who had served in the program, exposing them and their families to retaliation from al Qaeda and its sympathizers," he said in a letter this week to CIA employees.

'ABOVE THE LAW'

Human rights groups condemned the agency's actions.

Jameel Jaffer, Director of the American Civil Liberties Union's National Security Project, said in a statement: "Apparently the CIA believes that its agents are above the law."

Elisa Massimino of Human Rights First said: "At the same time Congress was passing laws to reinforce the ban on torture and other inhuman treatment of prisoners, it appears the CIA was destroying evidence of its own use of these illegal methods.

"Can there be a more telling admission that the CIA knew what it was doing was wrong?"

She said the U.S. Congress should demand, by subpoena if necessary, any remaining evidence of CIA prisoner abuse that had not already been destroyed.

Lawyers for current and former detainees held by the United States believe evidence exists that shows abuse either by the agency or by foreign security services with which it worked.

One of the destroyed CIA videos showed the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, a suspected al Qaeda leader whom the United States accuses of running training camps and funding terrorism. He alleges he was tortured for months before being transferred to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp from CIA secret jails in 2006.

Stafford Smith, who represents seven current Guantanamo inmates, said the destruction of the videos showed U.S. methods in the war on terrorism were self-defeating.