It Ain't the Crime, It's the Coverup

Barack Obama promised that the people who engaged in torture at the CIA would not be subject to prosecution, but it appears that this guarantee will not apply to people who actively destroyed evidence of torture:

When president Obama decided to release the Bush-era Justice Department's interrogation memos last month, he tried to calm an anxious CIA by publicly declaring that operatives who "reasonably" relied on them would not face criminal prosecution. But agency officials still have plenty to worry about. Despite Obama's assurances, a Justice Department special counsel is quietly ratcheting up his probe into a closely related subject: the CIA's destruction of hundreds of hours of videotape showing the waterboarding of two high-value Qaeda suspects. At the same time, a Senate panel is planning the first public hearing dealing with CIA interrogations, including testimony from a star witness: Ali Soufan, the former FBI agent who vigorously protested the questioning of one of the detainees, terror suspect Abu Zubaydah.

....

You can see my old post on this here.

Interestingly, these tapes were destroyed when both Congressional investigators, and a Federal Court Judge were demanding information of this sort.

While no one may go to jail for the torture, it is likely that some people, Michael Hayden, Porter Goss, and Jose Rodriguez who was the director of the CIA's operations directorate.

In a way, this might be better, because their defense against torture is protected by the OLC memos, as flawed (garbage really) as they are, but they did not receive an OLC memo to obstruct justice and destroy evidence.