Many of those involved recalled conversations in which 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.

That's right folks. The Porter Goss, former chairman of the House Intelligence Committee and partisan hack who helped whitewash the Bush administration's mistakes and misdeeds regarding 9/11, Iraq and the abuse at Abu Ghraib. The same Porter Goss who said of the possibility of investigating the outing of CIA covert operative Valerie Plame "Somebody sends me a blue dress and some DNA, I'll have an investigation." The Porter Goss who also proposed legislation that would have allowed the CIA to conduct secret operations inside the US, including the arrest of US citizens, without notifying Congress. The Porter Goss who became Bush's first appointed CIA Director after Clinton holdover George Tenet resigned (after falling on his sword and taking the blame for the faulty intelligence about Saddam Hussein's WMD programs). The Porter Goss whose right hand man at the Agency, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo was "up to his ears deep" in the bribery and corruption scandals involving Brent Wilkes, and former Congressman Randy "the Duke" Cunningham. The same Porter Goss who continued to insist that the CIA did not do torture, at the same time these so-called debates about whether to destroy the torture tapes was supposedly being bandied about by Bush officials and CIA lawyers. The same Porter Goss who offered no explanation for his surprise resignation in 2006 other than to state that it was "just one of those mysteries." The very Porter Goss who was a supporter and lapdog of Dick Cheney from the moment Cheney became the Great and Powerful Veep.

That Porter Goss. You now see my inner cynic coming to the fore. I don't doubt for one minute that there is no direct "paper trail" linking the decision to destroy the CIA torture tapes to President Bush, Vice President Cheney or anyone else in their administration. Count me as one of those who is deeply suspicious, however, of any claim that the decision to destroy the tapes was made solely by Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., a mid level CIA official.

The strongest evidence is the fact that Porter Goss, Bush's handpicked CIA chief, felt no need to reprimand Rodriguez in any way, despite the reported "fact" that his "decision" to destroy the tapes was in direct conflict with "five senior CIA and White House officials." If the Bush administration really did object to the destruction of the tapes, Goss would have had Rodriguez drawn and quartered for his insubordination and illegal action in obstructing justice. But I don't think anyone in the White House really wanted those tapes to survive. They just needed the proper fall guy to blame for it.

Allegedly the officials who counseled against destroying the tapes at a May, 2004 meeting were Harriet Miers, John B. Bellinger III (then National Security Council's top legal adviser) Tenet (when he was the CIA director) Scott Muller, the CIA's general counsel at the time and John D. Negroponte. Notably absent from this list of naysayers are the names of President Bush, Vice President Cheney and/or any of their more senior staff, such as Karl Rove. In other words, a few underlings without the power to decide the matter thought destroying the tapes was a bad idea. How many at that 2004 meeting disagreed with them, and who they were, we are not told. Please. Does anyone believe that the arguments made by these five individuals constituted the Bush administration's final word on the question of whether or not to destroy the tapes?

Indeed, I contend that anyone who thinks Rodriguez acted on his own initiative, without implicit or explicit promises that he would suffer no retaliation for destroying the tapes, tapes which documented acts of clear torture by CIA operatives that the Bush administration and the head of the CIA himself continued to claim had never occurred (despite their own knowledge to the contrary), torture that likely led to false and inaccurate information regarding terror plots which Bush exploited to frighten and manipulate American citizens into allowing him to grab as much power as possible from a cowed and compliant Congress, probably also believes that Tinker Bell's life was saved by all those hands clapping furiously at every performance of Peter Pan. In other words, I contend that the allegation Rodriguez acted alone is a fabrication. A canard. Or to be blunt, a lie.

I, for one, only enjoy fantasy as fiction, and not when it's not being passed off as fact. Don't you?