Hayden Tells Panel He Can't Answer Every Question About Tapes

CIA Director Michael V. Hayden reportedly said in a Senate hearing that the CIA interrogation tapes were made and destroyed by his predecessors. (By Gerald Martineau -- The Washington Post)

Mukasey, whose confirmation was nearly undone after he refused to say whether waterboarding is torture, said he is still studying the legal issues.

In a floor speech, Reid said the tape destruction had hurt the country's "moral authority" and said that the "the possibility of obstruction of justice is very real."

Intelligence officials have said that the destruction was ordered in November 2005 by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the CIA's director of clandestine operations, and that CIA lawyers approved the decision. Administration officials have said that Justice Department and White House lawyers, including longtime Bush aide Harriet E. Miers, had recommended against destroying the tapes.

President Bush, echoing previous remarks by his aides, said yesterday that he did not know about the tapes or their destruction until last week. "My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when Michael Hayden briefed me," Bush said in an interview yesterday with ABC News.

Hayden firmly defended the decision to destroy the tapes in a written message to CIA employees last week, saying that the tapes posed a "serious security risk" and were no longer relevant to any legislative or judicial inquiries.

One administration official said yesterday that Hayden is in a difficult position because "he wasn't at the CIA when the tapes were made, and he wasn't there when they were destroyed; he just gets to clean it up." But the official said that Hayden "thinks it would be less than honorable to throw other people from the CIA, including any predecessors, under a bus."

The disclosure of the destroyed tapes also has led plaintiffs' lawyers and defense attorneys to step up their demands for preservation orders covering interrogation records.

In one case yesterday, the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ordered the government not to destroy evidence related to the case of Majid Khan, a detainee who was in secret CIA custody for three years and is now at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Khan's attorneys alleged in a court filing two weeks ago that he was tortured and that they feared evidence of his treatment could be destroyed.

Staff writers Joby Warrick and Josh White and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.