On the day that Jose Rodriguez, former director of clandestine operations at the CIA, has been scheduled to testify before Congress, the Washington Post reports that he was forced to make a decision about torture tapes on his own.
"Jose could not get any specific direction out of his leadership" in 2005, one senior official said. Word of the resulting destruction, one former official said, was greeted by widespread relief among clandestine officers, and Rodriguez was neither penalized nor reprimanded, publicly or privately, by then-CIA Director Porter J. Goss, according to two officials briefed on exchanges between the two men.
According to this account, Rodriguez, under pressure from a station chief in Thailand who wanted to destroy tapes in his possession, allowed the destruction to take place. And according to this account, in was entirely an in-house decision with no input from higher-ups in the administration. We do learn that Thailand hosts one of those secret CIA prisons. Rodriguez believed he had "implicit" support right up to the top of the agency.
The tapes had been sitting in the station chief's safe, in the U.S. Embassy compound, for nearly three years. Although those involved in the interrogations had pushed for the tapes' destruction in those years and a secret debate about it had twice reached the White House, CIA officials had not acted on those requests. This time was different.
The CIA had a new director and an acting general counsel, neither of whom sought to block the destruction of the tapes, according to agency officials. The station chief was insistent because he was retiring and wanted to resolve the matter before he left, the officials said. And in November 2005, a published report that detailed a secret CIA prison system provoked an international outcry.
Those three circumstances pushed the CIA's then-director of clandestine operations, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., to act against the earlier advice of at least five senior CIA and White House officials, who had counseled the agency since 2003 that the tapes should be preserved. Rodriguez consulted CIA lawyers and officials, who told him that he had the legal right to order the destruction. In his view, he received their implicit support to do so, according to his attorney, Robert S. Bennett.
Update: There's a very useful post about the Washington Post article at Muckraker.
