WASHINGTON – EX CIA official Jose Rodriguez said it took a "few hours" to destroy 92 videotapes showing his CIA colleagues using harsh interrogation techniques - including waterboarding - on Qaeda leaders such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the former director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service told that he ordered the tapes destroyed to protect his colleagues from possible retaliation by Qaeda. The tapes of interrogations at a CIA "black site" included images of waterboarding - a form of simulated drowning - on Mohammed, Abd al Rahim al Nashiri and Abu Zubaydah, three Qaeda leaders now held at the US prison in Gitmo. Rodriguez said he was afraid the material would be leaked.
"You really doubt that those tapes would not be out in the open now, that they would not be on YouTube?" he said. "They would be out there, they would have been leaked, or somebody would have ordered their release."
After the tapes were destroyed in an "industrial-sized disintegrator," he said, "I felt good."
Rodriguez recounted his actions in a telephone interview about his just-released book "Hard Measures," which deals with the CIA's controversial use of "enhanced interrogation techniques" against suspected terrorists after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
In the book, Rodriguez, who retired from the CIA in 2007 after 31 years, said destroying the tapes got rid of "some ugly visuals that could put the lives of my people at risk." The CIA reprimanded him in December 2011 in connection with the destruction of the tapes in November 2005.