Criminal Investigation of Cia Tapes

The tussle over the CIA's decision to destroy tapes recording interrogation of terrorist suspects was yesterday ratcheted up when attorney general Michael Mukasey appointed an outside prosecutor to lead a criminal investigation.

Mukasey appointed federal prosecutor John Durham to assess whether to consider pressing criminal charges over the decision to trash the tapes in 2005. "I have concluded that there is a basis for initiating a criminal investigation of this matter," Mukasey said.

Such an investigation in a presidential election year is uncomfortable for the White House, particularly as it will focus on one of the most sensitive areas of the Bush post-9/11 strategy - allegations that torture was applied to suspects. The tapes were made by CIA agents interrogating two senior al-Qaida suspects, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, in 2002.

According to the New York Times, the tapes were to protect the agents from any later prosecutions for mistreatment. Abu Zubaydah was frail and interrogators feared that, if he died, they would be accused of killing him. Tapes show him subjected to water boarding - a cloth placed over his face, and water poured over it to make him feel he is drowning.

At the end of 2002 taping was stopped and Jose Rodriguez, head of CIA human intelligence gathering operations, asked permission to destroy them.

However, administration officials, including John Bellinger, then top lawyer at the National Security Council, are understood to have advised against. It will be a focal point to uncover how it was that, despite this, Rodriguez ordered the destruction in 2005 - and with whose authority.