(Xinhua)
Updated: 2007-12-13 11:35

WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has not totally informed US Congress of their intent to destroy the videotapes of interrogating terrorist suspects, a House committee said on Wednesday.

US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director Michael Hayden stops to talk to reporters as he arrives for a closed-door session with the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington Dec. 11, 2007. [Xinhua]

"Our committee was not informed, has not been kept informed, and we are very frustrated about the issue," said Democratic Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Sylvestre Reyes after a close-door meeting with CIA Director Michael Hayden.

During the three-hour meeting, Hayden also admitted that he knew of the existence of secret interrogation tapes more than a year ago in his tenure as principal deputy director of national intelligence, where he served from April 2005 to May 2006. But he did not know that they had been destroyed in 2005.

By acknowledging CIA "could have done an awful lot better at keeping the committee alerted and informed" when the tapes were destroyed, Hayden promised a "full accounting" of the matter.

Those who will be called to the hearings at the House committee also include former CIA chiefs George Tenet and Porter Goss, and John Negroponte, the former Director of National Intelligence who is now the deputy secretary of state, the committee said.

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Reyes said the Wednesday meeting "is just the first step in what we feel is going to be a long-term investigation" that might last several months.

The committee also said they would also look into the White House's interrogation policy and whether the CIA followed it.

In another testimony at a hearing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Hayden said he could not answer all questions about the tapes because they were created and destroyed before he arrived at the CIA, under the tenure of his predecessors Tenet and Goss.

The CIA chief told his employees on Thursday that the tapes, which were made in 2002 during interrogation of two al Qaeda suspects, were destroyed three years later due to concerns on safety of interrogators and their families.

He also said that Congress was notified both of the tapes' existence and CIA's intent to destroy them.

But many Democratic critics and some human rights groups criticized the tapes' destruction as an attempt to cover up interrogation practices such as "waterboarding" that were widely seen as torture.

President George W. Bush said he didn't know about the tapes or their destruction until last week.