White House Lawyers Told Of Videotapes

Miers, the White House counsel at the time of the briefings, was previously known to be involved in discussions of the tapes. Hayden's testimony expanded the number of White House officials alerted to their existence and the CIA's interest in destroying them.

Hayden's message to lawmakers last week was that the White House officials neither advocated destroying the tapes nor counseled against their destruction.

Hayden became CIA director in May 2006, after the tapes were destroyed. The ambiguity in his account of the White House briefings may be partly explained by his reliance on the recollections of others -- chiefly, agency lawyers whose decisions are now under congressional scrutiny, said one former senior attorney for the agency. "People are trying to recall stuff that happened four or five years ago," said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "They are trying to speak with honesty and candor, but they are also having to get 'lawyered' up themselves -- they have to protect themselves."

Congress and the Justice Department are investigating the handling of the tapes as possible obstruction of justice. A federal judge has scheduled a hearing on Friday into whether the CIA's action violated orders to preserve evidence relevant to lawsuits filed by prisoners in detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The two al-Qaeda operatives -- Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri -- were interrogated by the CIA before being transferred to Guantanamo Bay in 2006.

The New York Times first disclosed in yesterday's editions the involvement of all four White House officials in discussions about the tapes.

But White House officials reacted angrily to the newspaper's suggestion that they had not previously acknowledged being as deeply involved in the deliberations, taking particular issue with part of the headline on the article -- "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said." Spokeswoman Dana Perino said the White House had never officially described what its role was.

"The New York Times' inference that there is an effort to mislead in this matter is pernicious and troubling," Perino said in a statement.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for the Times, said in an e-mail that the headline could have been written with more precision and that a correction is forthcoming. But she noted that the White House had not challenged the accuracy of the article.

Perino and a spokeswoman for Vice President Cheney otherwise declined to comment on the involvement of the four officials, noting the ongoing investigations.

Meanwhile, the Bush administration's nominee for deputy attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday he would have advised the CIA to preserve the interrogation tapes, regardless of whether they were technically subject to a court order.

U.S. District Judge Mark Filip of Chicago testified that in addition to telling CIA officials "what their legal responsibilities were," he also would have given them "broader, more prudential sort of advice."

"It might be the better practice to keep those, in any event, given the nature of the interests at stake, in terms of the subject matter that was on the tapes," Filip said.

But Filip also echoed the remarks of his potential boss, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey, by refusing to say whether waterboarding amounts to illegal torture.

Staff writer Dan Eggen contributed to this report.