UN expert: Tapes point to CIA torture

The destruction of CIA interrogation tapes supports suspicions that the agency used torture to gather information from terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, a U.N. human rights expert who recently visited the prison said Thursday.

Martin Scheinin, the U.N. independent investigator on human rights in the fight against terrorism, also said he had reason to believe the CIA continues to use interrogation methods that violate international law.

"The destruction of videotapes of CIA interrogations is one more argument that supports the contention that the CIA has been involved, and continues to be involved, in the use of interrogation techniques that violate the absolute prohibition against torture and other inhuman or degrading treatment," he told reporters.

Scheinin did not explain how he reached this conclusion.

There was no immediate response from U.S. officials to Scheinin's comments. But the CIA's director, Gen. Michael Hayden, has said the destroyed tapes did not show any unlawful interrogations.

In a Dec. 6 memo to the CIA's staff disclosing the existence of the tapes and their destruction, Hayden said the tapes had been reviewed by CIA lawyers who "determined that they showed lawful methods of questioning."

The CIA denies it ever tortures detainees, and the harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding has been prohibited since 2006 by Hayden.

The tapes in question showed the interrogations of two top terrorism suspects in 2002. The CIA destroyed the tapes three years later out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of U.S. questioners, Hayden said in his memo.

Scheinin's comments came a day after he presented his findings on the legal process at Guantanamo to the U.N. Human Rights Council.

U.S. officials described Scheinin's reporting on the military commissions set up to try detainees as misleading, ill-informed and oversimplified.

Scheinin, a Finnish professor who acts as an independent expert for the 47-nation human rights body, visited Guantanamo last week to observe a legal hearing for one of the 305 detainees now held at the facility.

He said CIA officials with whom he met at Guantanamo "failed to answer any single question in a substantive way, in a meaningful way, which only confirmed the suspicion that they have too much to hide, so they prefer not to answer questions."

Scheinin said he believed the United States would not prosecute about 150 Guantanamo detainees because of the sensitive information that might be revealed in trials.

"Bringing them to court would bring to the court's attention the methods through which the evidence, including the confessions, were obtained," he said.