They still don't get it

A scoop on the destruction of the CIA tapes is in today's Washington Post.

How did the director of clandestine operations Jose A. Rodriguez, Jr., decide to order them to be destroyed?

[...] senior CIA and White House officials advised against destroying the tapes, but without expressly prohibiting it, leaving an odd vacuum of specific instructions on a such a politically sensitive matter. They said that Rodriguez then interpreted this silence -- the absence of a decision to order the tapes' preservation -- as a tacit approval of their destruction.

"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.

See the pattern here? The administration makes public statements like "we need to get tough" and "forward-leaning", directly calls public officials from the Vice President's office to exert pressure for quick results, and when the officials ask for explicit direction, gives only legalese and leaves ambiguity. See full article by Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus here.

And here's the upside-down priority list again: as to why Rodriguez's boss Porter Goss didn't reprimand him for destroying the tapes,

"Frankly, there were more important issues that needed to be focused on, such as trying to preserve a critical [interrogation] program and salvage relationships that had been damaged because of the leaks" about the existence of the secret prisons, said a former agency official familiar with Goss's position at the time.

So, relationships had been damaged because of the leaks about the existence of the secret prisons. What about the damage caused to the country because of the secret prisons?