Current and former CIA officials have said that the tapes were destroyed out of concern for the safety of agency operatives who could be identified if the tapes were leaked to the public.
According to accounts by some of the current and former officials, Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed after receiving a request to dispose of the recordings from the CIA's station chief in Bangkok, Thailand, where one of the agency's secret prison facilities was located. Details about that request were first revealed Wednesday in a report by the Washington Post.
Lawmakers declined to discuss details of their hearing Wednesday with John Rizzo, the acting general counsel of the CIA, who was involved in discussions within the agency about whether the tapes should be destroyed. Former CIA officials have said that Rizzo cautioned against doing so but did not instruct Rodriguez to preserve the recordings.
Rep. Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas), chairman of the committee, said Rizzo's testimony was "highly detailed," adding that the panel has also received more than 300 pages of internal CIA documents.
Reyes and Hoekstra said they still intended to compel Rodriguez to testify before the committee but indicated that they were considering whether to grant Rodriguez's request for immunity. Rodriguez is in the process of retiring from the agency.
The hearing came on the same day that the nation's top intelligence official, J. Michael McConnell, delivered a speech in Maryland in which he was asked about waterboarding.
McConnell had been quoted in an article in this week's New Yorker magazine saying that for him "it would be torture" to be subjected to waterboarding. Asked about the comment, McConnell defended the CIA's interrogation program, and said information gleaned through interrogations had disrupted potentially deadly terrorist plots.
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greg.miller@latimes.com
