The Justice Department, under questioning from the federal judge in the case in 2005, denied that any tape recording of the interrogations existed, only to concede last month that the C.I.A. had found three tapes that are apparently still in existence.
There is no record of the interrogation of Mr. Goldwire.
The CIA did not destroy evidence, Hayden told them, because the agency had extensive records of the interrogations, from field cables, memoranda and internal emails.
The agency had withheld the fact that the tapes existed from both the federal courts and the Sept. 11 Commission, which had asked the agency for records of the interrogations.
Mr. Moussaoui's lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui — showing that the Al Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.
Laws requiring the electronic recording of the entire interrogation of all homicides and other serious felonies will now expose contamination if it exists and allow judges and jurors to see what, if any, details were fed to unknowing suspects.
Without a recording of the entire interrogation, juries cannot spot contamination and too readily credit police testimony that the suspect volunteered the details that "only the true perpetrator could have known".
Carol Rosenberg and Tom Lasseter, of the Miami Herald (representing the McClatchy papers, among those who had the files), write of records of interrogation after interrogation, Yet there's not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing bin Laden.
Since no recording was made of the interrogation, there's no way to know exactly what information the boys volunteered and what they parroted back to the detectives.
The public record of the Guantánamo interrogation of the detainee, Mohammed al-Qahtani, has long included what officials labeled abusive techniques, including exposure to extreme temperatures and isolation, but the Pentagon has resisted acknowledging that his treatment rose to the level of torture.
