CIA COVER-UP.

"The tapes exist -- they're in Virginia." That's what a woman told me at a cocktail party near Dupont Circle earlier this week. She was talking about the CIA videotapes, of course. Her colleague, a former intelligence officer, told her the news.

Honestly, I have no idea whether or not they are right. But I would be surprised if there were no copies of the tapes. Almost every aspect of the terror war, in whatever part of the world, has been photographed, videotaped and scrupulously documented -- officially and unofficially (see Abu Ghraib). Over the past two years, I have visited with dozens of soldiers back from Iraq and clicked through hundreds, if not thousands, of images from the war, including many that would seem to constitute war crimes -- all duly stored on hard drives. It would be very odd if there remains no trace of the infamous interrogation tapes. In the meantime, it seems as if the worst nightmare of administration officials has come to pass: A criminal investigation into the destruction of the videotapes, raising the possibility that individuals working for the CIA, and possibly even administration officials themselves, will be prosecuted for crimes relating to interrogations -- a development that is reported on page one of both The New York Times and The Washington Post today.

Administration officials had worked hard for years to avoid such a possibility. In fact, as research professor Robert F. Coulam of Simmons College discovered while studying the government's work on interrogations, according to a May 30, 2007, New York Times article, the government's "most vigorous work on interrogation to date has been in seeking legal justification for harsh tactics" -- rather than, for example, trying to sort out better ways of obtaining information from people who may be planning a terrorist attack. It was a super-cautious, legalistic tendency that seems to have led to the destruction of the tapes -- and, in the end, could end with the prosecution of the individuals involved.

--Tara McKelvey