Congress Summons CIA Director

CIA Director General Michael Hayden has been summoned by Congress and will appear Tuesday and Wednesday before the Senate and House Intelligence committees to answer questions about the destruction of secret CIA videotapes that documented the abuse of detainees. The White House counsel, meanwhile, has ordered press secretary Dana Perino to keep quiet on the matter.

AP via Google:

Among the questions he’ll face is whether Congress was notified about the tapes’ destruction. The chairman of the House panel, Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, said Hayden’s assertion last week that lawmakers were informed “does not appear to be true.”

Hayden told CIA employees on Thursday that the CIA had taped the interrogations of two terrorist suspects in 2002. He said Congress was notified in 2003 both of the tapes’ existence and the CIA’s intent to destroy them.

The tapes were destroyed in 2005 but Congress was not told until 2006 at the earliest. The House Intelligence Committee did not learn of the tapes’ destruction until March 2007, and then indirectly during a general briefing about the CIA’s interrogation program, Reyes said.

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