News broke yesterday that the CIA had videotaped its interrogations of two major terrorism suspects in 2002, then erased the tapes three years later. Capitol Hill’s response to the admission has involved the predictable table-thumping, outraged diatribes by those seeking to get their face on Friday’s news footage and thus show their constituents that they are, in fact, earning their salaries.

It’s pathetic, really.

See, the one thing the blow hards keep overlooking is that the CIA wasn’t even required to tape the interrogations in the first place. The decision to do so, CIA Director Michael Hayden has explained, was the direct result of the President’s authorization to use aggressive techniques like waterboarding. Simply put, the CIA taped the interrogations so they could review them to make sure limits weren’t crossed.

“The Agency was determined that it proceed in accord with established legal and policy guidelines. So, on its own, CIA began to videotape interrogations,” Hayden said in a written message to CIA employees, obtained by The Associated Press.

In other words, the tapes were purely voluntary on the CIA’s part, which should make the decision whether to keep or erase them entirely within the Agency’s discretion, too.

Naturally, there’s no shortage of Congress members trying to imply that the tapes must have contained damning evidence if the CIA felt compelled to destroy them. But the fact that the tapes were made in the first place — and then kept around for three entire years — is one of the best arguments against such implications.

To make the political outrage even more laughable, it turns out that four Congress members knew of the tapes while they existed, including one member of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Jane Harman (D-California).

“I told the CIA that destroying videotapes of interrogations was a bad idea and urged them in writing not to do it,” Harman said. While key lawmakers were briefed on the CIA’s intention to destroy the tapes, they were not notified two years later when the spy agency went through with the plan. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., said the committee only learned of the tapes’ destruction in November 2006.

2006? 2006?!

Why the outrage now, an entire year later?

Must be a slow news day on Capitol Hill, folks.