Wall Street Journal, Sat/Sun Dec 8-9, 2007, p. A4

The CIA is once again in hot water with the US Congress. Several years ago the CIA taped some interrogations it conducted and recently destroyed those tapes because they had no additional intelligence value. Keeping the tapes, however, put at risk having the interrogators identified.

Shortly after 11 September 2001 there seemed to be a lot of discussion about who knew what and when about the terrorists. It came out that law enforcement knew some useful information but kept it quite so as to not have the criminal investigation tainted. I thought we had learned from that experience that there were greater goals to be obtained than simply “brining terrorist to justice”. Is not better to prevent acts of terror than to allow them to occur and then put the parties on trial?

Assuming the CIA’s version is correct and that Congress was indeed notified of the destruction, then I think they did the right thing