The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantanamo Bay and so far has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a suspect.
The Pentagon review was begun in late January after the CIA acknowledged it had destroyed its own videotapes of harsh interrogations conducted by CIA officers, an action that is now the subject of criminal and congressional investigations.
The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.
The officials said it appeared that only a small fraction of the tens of thousands of interrogations worldwide since 2001 had been recorded.
The officials said the nearly 50 tapes they identified documented interrogations of two terror suspects, Jose Padilla and Ali al-Marri, and were made at a Navy detention facility in Charleston, S.C.
Two government officials said that one tape shows al-Marri being manhandled by his interrogators but does not show waterboarding or any other treatment approaching torture.
The initial findings of the incomplete Pentagon review represent the first official acknowledgment that military interrogators had videotaped some sessions with detainees and could widen the controversy over the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
A Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell, cautioned that the review of interrogation videotapes is incomplete, and a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency, Don Black, said that tapes had been routinely destroyed if they were judged to have no continuing value.