CIA Admits It Destroyed Tapes Of Interrogations

Justice, CIA watchdog launch inquiry
It's a first step to see whether the agency acted criminally in destroying videotapes of terrorism suspects' interrogations.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...ec09,1,7646278.story?coll=la-headlines-nation

By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 9, 2007

WASHINGTON -- The Justice Department and the CIA's Office of the Inspector General said Saturday that they had launched a joint inquiry into the CIA's controversial destruction of videotaped interrogations of two Al Qaeda suspects. The preliminary inquiry would be a first step in determining whether a full investigation and potential criminal charges were warranted.

The probe had been under discussion since shortly after CIA Director Michael V. Hayden disclosed Thursday that CIA officials had made the videotapes in 2002 and destroyed them three years later. The Justice Department has asked for an initial meeting with the CIA's legal staff and inspector general, John L. Helgerson, early this week.

"I welcome this inquiry, and the CIA will cooperate fully," Hayden said Saturday in a statement. "I welcome it as an opportunity to address questions that have arisen over the destruction back in 2005 of videotapes."

Hayden's disclosure, made in a letter to employees, has caused an uproar in Congress and among some human rights advocates and defense lawyers. Many have called for investigations, charging that the agency lied about the tapes' existence and then destroyed them to cover up evidence of extremely harsh, possibly illegal interrogations.

One staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, speaking on condition of anonymity because the inquiry is ongoing, said the CIA's actions could amount to obstruction of justice and false testimony to Congress -- both federal crimes -- because the agency did not turn over requested interrogation tapes to the congressionally appointed Sept. 11 commission.

The CIA has agreed to "preserve any records or other documentation that would facilitate this inquiry," Asst. Atty. Gen. Kenneth L. Wainstein, head of the Justice Department's national security division, said in a letter Saturday to the CIA's acting general counsel, John A. Rizzo.

At least one member of Congress and, reportedly, a senior White House official claim to have told the CIA to preserve the tapes before they were destroyed.

"Everybody from the top on down told them not to do it and still they went ahead and did it anyway," a senior U.S. official familiar with the internal discussions said Saturday. The fact that the tapes were destroyed despite those warnings figures prominently in the inquiry, the official said.

The decision to destroy the tapes was reportedly made by the head of the CIA's clandestine operations at the time, Jose A. Rodriguez Jr.

Democratic leaders demanded Friday that Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey order a full Justice Department probe. It was unclear Saturday what role Mukasey played in the launching of the inquiry.

House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) said Saturday that the inquiry would be "an important first test for Atty. Gen. Mukasey." He said his committee would begin its own probe, also reviewing "what was depicted on the tapes -- the interrogation practices that were authorized at the highest levels of government."

The Senate Intelligence Committee has announced an inquiry as well.

The White House said Saturday that it supported the Justice-CIA inquiry.

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said he could not comment on any aspect of the inquiry except to say it would focus foremost on the circumstances surrounding the destruction of the tapes.

"We are just beginning and gathering the initial facts," he said.

In Hayden's letter to employees Thursday, the CIA director implied that one of the videotaped interrogations was of Abu Zubaydah, a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant captured in Pakistan in March 2002. The second suspect was identified Saturday as Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, a suspected mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole warship in Yemen.

A U.S. intelligence official said Saturday that the CIA did not videotape the interrogations of any other suspected senior Al Qaeda operatives. The practice was discontinued sometime in 2002.

Hayden's letter said the sessions were taped for the legal protection of interrogators using harsh new procedures to get Zubaydah and other defiant prisoners to talk.

Hayden also said that the Office of the Inspector General examined the tapes in 2003 "as part of its look at the agency's detention and interrogation practices," but he did not say whether the office approved of what was on the tapes.

And Hayden said that the existence of the tapes was disclosed to congressional oversight committees "years ago," and that the agency later notified the panels of the tapes' destruction.

Probe into destroyed CIA interrogation videos begins

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/nation/5363362.html

By JOSH WHITE
Washington Post
12/9/2007

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the CIA announced Saturday that they have started a preliminary inquiry into the CIA's 2005 destruction of videotapes that depicted harsh interrogation of two terrorist suspects.

The announcement follows congressional demands Friday for an investigation into the CIA's action despite warnings from the White House and congressional leaders to preserve the tapes.

CIA Director Michael Hayden disclosed the destruction of the tapes Thursday in a letter to his staff, telling them that the identities of the interrogators in the 2002 sessions needed to be protected. Some lawmakers have rejected that explanation.

In a letter sent Saturday, Kenneth Wainstein, of the Justice Department's national security division, wrote to CIA General Counsel John Rizzo to confirm the inquiry and asked the CIA to preserve evidence and documents.

Wainstein indicated in the letter that he will be working with the CIA inspector general's office to determine "whether a further investigation is warranted."

Hayden said in a statement released Saturday that the CIA will cooperate fully with the joint inquiry.

CIA is accused of torture cover-up

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article3022192.ece

Sarah Baxter
12/9/2007

The CIA has been accused of covering up the torture of two top Al-Qaeda terror suspects after it emerged that White House and justice department officials and senior congressmen warned it against destroying hundreds of hours of videotape of the interrogations in 2003.

The tapes were destroyed in November 2005, the month in which The Washington Post exposed the CIA’s imprisonment of suspected terrorists at “black sites”. Last night the justice department and the CIA’s internal watchdog launched an investigation.

The tapes show the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who are now held in Guantanamo Bay. Zubaydah is believed to have been “waterboarded”, a technique that induces panic by simulating drowning, while al-Nashiri has complained that he was extensively tortured.

Harriet Miers, the White House counsel for President George W Bush, told CIA officials she opposed the destruction of the tapes, according to Bush administration sources. Porter Goss, who went on to become director of the CIA in 2004, also warned against their destruction when he was a senior congressman in charge of the House intelligence committee.

The destruction of the tapes occurred on Goss’s watch, but it appears he was not warned in advance by Jose Rodriguez, the head of the agency’s clandestine service. The existence of the tapes was kept secret from members of the September 11 commission, which had asked for all material relating to detainees.

Lee Hamilton, the co-chairman of the September 11 commission, said: “It certainly raises a suspicion of a cover-up, of activities they’re not proud of . . . activities they might even think are criminal.” The CIA had clearly obstructed the inquiry, Hamilton added.

What about this?

Controllers' 9/11 Tapes Willfully Destroyed
F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Statements
Cassette Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Recollections Destroyed

Gold9472 said:

What about this?

Controllers' 9/11 Tapes Willfully Destroyed
F.A.A. Official Scrapped Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Statements
Cassette Tape of 9/11 Controllers' Recollections Destroyed

Click to expand...

You've quantified everything right there Jon. They do it over and over. The news covers it, and the people just switch over to another channel. My attitude on topics like this has really started changing of late. The "People" are going to get exactly what they deserve for their lifetime of acceptance.

AuGmENTor said:

You've quantified everything right there Jon. They do it over and over. The news covers it, and the people just switch over to another channel. My attitude on topics like this has really started changing of late. The "People" are going to get exactly what they deserve for their lifetime of acceptance.

Click to expand...

What about this?

Weldon: Atta Papers Destroyed on Orders

Are you trying to piss me off on purpose?

AuGmENTor said:

Are you trying to piss me off on purpose?

Click to expand...

heheheheheh...

Senator seeks tougher CIA tapes inquiry

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22171303/

By Demetri Sevastopulo in Washington
updated 6 minutes ago

The controversy over the CIA's destruction of videotapes allegedly showing harsh interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects grew on Sunday with an influential Democrat calling for a special counsel investigation.

A joint investigation by the US justice department and the CIA inspector-general was announced at the weekend. But Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Senate foreign affairs committee and a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said this would not be sufficiently independent.

Mr Biden questioned the ability of Michael Mukasey, the new attorney-general, to oversee an internal inquiry, given his previous refusal to tell Congress the "waterboarding" - or simulated drowning - interrogation method constituted torture.

"He's the same guy who couldn't decide whether waterboarding was torture and he's going to be doing this investigation," said Mr Biden. "I think it's clearer and crisper and everyone will know what the truth [is] . . . if he appoints a special counsel; steps back from it."

The Senate and House intelligence committees are also investigating the destruction of the tapes, which showed the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, an alleged 9/11 planner, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole in Aden.

Michael Hayden, the CIA's director, has defended the tapes' destruction, saying it protected agents' identities. But several Bush administration officials had reportedly warned the intelligence agency not to destroy them.

Mr Biden said: "It appears there may be an 'obstruction of justice' charge here. . . I think this leads right into the White House. There may be a legal and rational explanation, but I don't see any on the face of it."

The US administration has been criticised around the world over a CIA secret prison programme in which terrorist suspects were interrogated using harsh methods such as waterboarding.

The tape scandal comes as the US intelligence community is under attack from neo-conservatives over the release of an intelligence report saying Iran had halted its nuclear weapons programme in 2003.

White House goes mum on CIA video case

http://rawstory.com/news/afp/White_House_goes_mum_on_CIA_video_c_12102007.html

Published: Monday December 10, 2007

The White House said Monday it would not answer questions about the CIA's destroying interrogation tapes of terrorism suspects, citing ongoing investigations into what some have called a cover-up.

Spokesman Dana Perino said that US President George W. Bush's official lawyer had requested a no-comment policy while the US Justice Department and Central Intelligence Agency looked into the simmering controversy.

"Until that process works itself out, I'm going to adhere to their request," she told reporters. "I think that that's appropriate, and I'll adhere to it."

When a reporter noted that the White House has similarly stonewalled questions about other potentially embarrassing issues, and suggested that such a policy was politically expedient, Perino bristled.

"I can see why that cynicism that usually drifts from this room could come up in this regard. What I can tell you is that I try my best to get you as much information as I can, and in this regard I've been asked by our Counsel's office not to comment, and I'm not going to," she said.

But she repeated that Bush had no recollection of being told about the tapes or about their destruction in 2005 until briefed last week following media reports.

Some of Bush's Democratic critics and human rights groups have denounced the decision as an attempt to cover up interrogation practices widely seen as torture -- despite Washington's insistence that it does not torture.

The videotapes, made in 2002, reportedly showed harsh interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, who were among the first suspects interrogated by the CIA after the September 11, 2001 attacks.

CIA director Michael Hayden, who was not leading the agency when the tapes were destroyed, has said that doing so was necessary to avoid having the recordings leak to the public, revealing the identity of CIA questioners.

STOP! PLEASE!! I can't TAKE any more!!!

Ex-CIA interrogator says waterboarding is torture

http://africa.reuters.com/world/news/usnN11502781.html

Tue 11 Dec 2007, 16:53 GMT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - CIA officials extracted valuable information from a terrorism suspect after he was subjected to waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique that has been condemned as torture, a former CIA interrogator told U.S. new media.

Suspected al Qaeda lieutenant Abu Zubaida offered to cooperate less than a minute after CIA officials subjected him to the controversial technique, former CIA interrogator John Kiriakou told ABC News and the Washington Post.

"It was like flipping a switch," Kiriakou told the Post. He said the session yielded valuable information and probably helped prevent attacks, but he now believes waterboarding is torture and "Americans are better than that."

Kiriakou, who now works in the private sector, came forward as the CIA faced sharp criticism for destroying a videotape of the interrogation, along with another showing the interrogation of a second suspected al Qaeda member.

Critics have charged that the agency destroyed the tapes to hide evidence of illegal torture. The CIA said it destroyed the tapes in 2005 to protect the interrogators from possible retaliation. A judge had ordered the tapes to be preserved as possible evidence in a lawsuit filed by captives at the Guantanamo Bay military prison.

The Justice Department, the CIA and two congressional committees all plan to investigate the tape destruction.

Abu Zubaida was captured in Pakistan in the spring of 2002, one of the first high-level al Qaeda operatives to come into U.S. custody after the September 11, 2001, hijacking attacks.

He was defiant and uncooperative until he was waterboarded that summer, said Kiriakou, who did not participate in the interrogation but was briefed by those who did. The next day he offered to tell his captors everything he knew, Kiriakou said.

Many countries, U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have denounced waterboarding as torture. It is believed the technique has not been used by the CIA since 2003.

Destruction of C.I.A. Tapes Cleared by Lawyers

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/11/washington/11intel.html?ei=5065&en=baf5762a95284c12&ex=1198040400&adxnnl=1&partner=MYWAY&adxnnlx=1197374964-hJBHTlq6gnDuSyE/V06lEQ&pagewanted=print

By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE
December 11, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10 — Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.

The involvement of agency lawyers in the decision making would widen the scope of the inquiries into the matter that have now begun in Congress and within the Justice Department. Any written documents are certain to be a focus of government investigators as they try to reconstruct the events leading up to the tapes’ destruction.

The former intelligence official acknowledged that there had been nearly two years of debate among government agencies about what to do with the tapes, and that lawyers within the White House and the Justice Department had in 2003 advised against a plan to destroy them. But the official said that C.I.A. officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the C.I.A. was never given a direct order not to destroy the tapes.

“They never told us, ‘Hell, no,’” he said. “If somebody had said, ‘You cannot destroy them,’ we would not have destroyed them.”

The former official spoke on condition of anonymity because there is a continuing Justice Department inquiry into the matter. He said he was sympathetic to Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former chief of the clandestine branch, who has been described by intelligence officials as having authorized the destruction of the tapes. The former official said he was concerned that Mr. Rodriguez was being unfairly singled out for blame in the destruction of the tapes.

The former official said Mr. Rodriguez decided in November 2005 that he had sufficient authority to destroy the interrogation videos, based on the written authorization given to him from lawyers within the branch, then known as the Directorate of Operations.

The C.I.A. has said that the two interrogations shown in the videotapes occurred in 2002, and that the taping of interrogations stopped that year. On Monday, however, a lawyer representing a former prisoner who said he was held by the C.I.A. said the prisoner saw cameras in interrogation rooms after 2002.

In describing the decision to destroy the tapes, current and former officials said John A. Rizzo, the agency’s top lawyer at the time, was not asked for final approval before the tapes were destroyed, although Mr. Rizzo had been involved in discussions for two years about the tapes.

It is unclear what weight an opinion from a lawyer within the clandestine service would have if it were not formally approved by Mr. Rizzo. But the former official said Mr. Rodriguez and others in the clandestine branch believed the legal judgment gave them the blessing to destroy the tapes.

The former official said the leaders of the clandestine service believed they “didn’t need to ask Rizzo’s permission.”

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, is scheduled to appear before a closed session of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday to answer questions about the tapes’ destruction. He has defended the action as having been “done in line with the law,” but the destruction has prompted sharp criticism from Republicans and Democrats in Congress.

Officials at the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency were directed over the weekend to preserve any documents related to the destruction of the tapes.

The former intelligence official who described the decision to destroy the tapes said Mr. Rodriguez’s primary concern was the safety of C.I.A. agents whose faces could be identified in the tapes. The tapes were destroyed amid growing Congressional and legal scrutiny into the C.I.A’s detention and interrogation program.

Some former C.I.A. officials said they would be very surprised if a lawyer for the Directorate of Operations, or D.O., would give legal approval for such a controversial decision without consulting Mr. Rizzo.

“Although unlikely, it is conceivable that once a C.I.A. officer got the answer he wanted from a D.O. lawyer, he acted on that advice,” said John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer between 2002 and 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law in Minnesota. “But a streamlined process like that would have been risky for both the officer and the D.O. lawyer.”

Mr. Radsan added, “I’d be surprised that even the chief D.O. lawyer made a decision of that magnitude without bringing the General Counsel’s front office into the loop.”

In mid-2005, the name of the Directorate of Operations was changed to the National Clandestine Service.

Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment for this article, citing the joint investigation into the matter by the Justice Department and the C.I.A’s inspector general.

The former prisoner who reported seeing cameras, Muhammad Bashmilah of Yemen, was seized by Jordanian intelligence agents in 2003 and turned over to the C.I.A., according to an investigation by Amnesty International, the human rights advocacy organization. He was flown from Jordan to Afghanistan in October 2003 and held there until April 2004, when he was flown by plane and helicopter to a C.I.A. jail in an unidentified country, Amnesty found. Mr. Bashmilah and two other Yemeni men held with him were flown to Yemen in May 2005 and later released.

Meg Satterthwaite, a director of the International Human Rights Clinic at New York University who is representing Mr. Bashmilah in a lawsuit, said Mr. Bashmilah described cameras both in his cells and in interrogation rooms, some on tripods and some on the wall. She said his descriptions of his imprisonment, in hours of conversation in Yemen and by phone this year, were lucid and detailed.

In a message to C.I.A. employees on Thursday, General Hayden said “videotaping stopped in 2002,” after officials “determined that its documentary reporting was full and exacting, removing any need for tapes.”

Asked Monday about Mr. Bashmilah’s claims, Mr. Gimigliano said he had nothing to add to General Hayden’s statement.

In a related legal action, lawyers representing 11 inmates of the American military detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, filed an emergency motion on Sunday seeking a hearing on whether the government has obeyed a 2005 judge’s order to preserve evidence in their case.

The C.I.A.’s destruction of tapes “raises grave concerns about the government’s compliance with the preservation order entered by this court,” the lawyers, David H. Remes and Marc D. Falkoff, wrote in their motion.

The June 2005 order, signed by Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr., of the United States District Court in Washington, required the government to “preserve and maintain all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees” at Guantánamo.

That preservation order, one of several issued in Guantánamo cases, may be relevant to the C.I.A. videotapes, Mr. Remes said. He noted that the government has said that “a senior Al Qaeda lieutenant” reported seeing one of his Guantánamo clients in Afghanistan, raising the possibility that the statements on the destroyed videotapes may be relevant to his case.

“There is never any justification for destroying materials that any reasonable person would believe might be requested in a civil or criminal proceeding,” said Mr. Remes, of the law firm Covington & Burling. “The C.I.A. had every reason to believe the videotapes would be relevant down the road.”

The Man Who Ordered CIA's Tape Destruction
Jose Rodriguez Ordered Tapes Of Terror Interrogations Destroyed Without Telling CIA Director

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/12/10/eveningnews/main3604018.shtml

WASHINGTON, Dec. 10, 2007

(CBS) He is the man who ordered the destruction of video tapes documenting the CIA’s interrogation of two high-level al Qaeda operatives.

The then-head of the clandestine service, Jose Rodriguez, ordered the tapes destroyed shortly after a Washington Post expose focused attention on the CIA’s secret prisons, CBS News national security correspondent David Martin reports.

“Well, I think there might have been concern that those tapes could have been called for by some outside body and the CIA would no longer maintain control over them,” said retired CIA officer John Brennan, who is now a CBS News consultant.

Brennan says Rodriguez was also worried the Justice Department was backing away from its earlier support of harsh interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding.

“And that therefore agency officers who participated in those interrogation sessions may be subject to some type of prosecution,” Brennan said.

Rodriguiz ordered the tapes destroyed without telling then-CIA director Porter Goss and against the advice of the CIA’s own general counsel, the White House deputy counsel and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee.

“I expressed concern about destroying any video tapes and said that would be a very ill-advised move by the agency,” Rep. Jane Harman, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said.

Former CIA officer John Kiriakou led the raid, which captured the al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, told CBS News he and at least one other CIA officer refused to use the harsh interrogation techniques.

That job, he said, was turned over to retired commandos under contract to the CIA.

The CIA's Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gerald-posner/the-cias-destroyed-inter_b_75850.html

Gerald Posner
Posted December 7, 2007 | 03:25 PM (EST)

On December 5, the CIA's director, General Michael V. Hayden, issued a statement disclosing that in 2005 at least two videotapes of interrogations with al Qaeda prisoners were destroyed. The tapes, which the CIA did not provide to either the 9/11 Commission, nor to a federal court in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, were destroyed, claimed Hayden, to protect the safety of undercover operatives.

Hayden did not disclose one of the al Qaeda suspects whose tapes were destroyed. But he did identify the other. It was Abu Zubaydah, the top ranking terror suspect when he was tracked and captured in Pakistan in 2003. In September 2006, at a press conference in which he defended American interrogation techniques, President Bush also mentioned Abu Zubaydah by name. Bush acknowledged that Zubaydah, who was wounded when captured, did not initially cooperate with his interrogators, but that eventually when he did talk, his information was, according to Bush, "quite important."

In my 2003 New York Times bestseller, Why America Slept: The Failure to Prevent 9/11, I discussed Abu Zubaydah at length in Chapter 19, "The Interrogation." There I set forth how Zubaydah initially refused to help his American captors. Also, disclosed was how U.S. intelligence established a so-called "fake flag" operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers.

Instead, when confronted by his "Saudi" interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. "He will tell you what to do," Zubaydah assured them

That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd's nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

American interrogators used painkillers to induce Zubaydah to talk -- they gave him the meds when he cooperated, and withdrew them when he was quiet. They also utilized a thiopental sodium drip (a so-called truth serum). Several hours after he first fingered Prince Ahmed, his captors challenged the information, and said that since he had disparaged the Saudi royal family, he would be executed. It was at that point that some of the secrets of 9/11 came pouring out. In a short monologue, that one investigator told me was the "Rosetta Stone" of 9/11, Zubaydah laid out details of how he and the al Qaeda hierarchy had been supported at high levels inside the Saudi and Pakistan governments.

He named two other Saudi princes, and also the chief of Pakistan's air force, as his major contacts. Moreover, he stunned his interrogators, by charging that two of the men, the King's nephew, and the Pakistani Air Force chief, knew a major terror operation was planned for America on 9/11.

It would be nice to further investigate the men named by Zubaydah, but that is not possible. All four identified by Zubaydah are now dead. As for the three Saudi princes, the King's 43-year-old nephew, Prince Ahmed, died of either a heart attack or blood clot, depending on which report you believe, after having liposuction in Riyadh's top hospital; the second, 41-year-old Prince Sultan bin Faisal bin Turki al-Saud, died the following day in a one car accident, on his way to the funeral of Prince Ahmed; and one week later, the third Saudi prince named by Zubaydah, 25-year-old Prince Fahd bin Turki bin Saud al-Kabir, died, according to the Saudi Royal Court, "of thirst." The head of Pakistan's Air Force, Mushaf Ali Mir, was the last to go. He died, together with his wife and fifteen of his top aides, when his plane blew up -- suspected as sabotage -- in February 2003. Pakistan's investigation of the explosion -- if one was even done -- has never been made public.

Zubaydah is the only top al Queda operative who has secretly linked two of America's closest allies in the war on terror -- Saudi Arabia and Pakistan -- to the 9/11 attacks. Why does Bush, and the CIA, continue to protect the Saudi Royal family and the Pakistani military, from the implications of Zubaydah's confessions? It is, or course, because the Bush administration desperately needs Pakistani and Saudi help, not only to keep Afghanistan from spinning completely out of control, but also as counterweights to the growing power of Iran. The Sunni governments in Riyadh and Islamabad have as much to fear from a resurgent Iran as does the Bush administration. But does this mean that leads about the origins of 9/11 should not be aggressively pursued? Of course not. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is doing. And now the cover-up is enhanced by the CIA's destruction of Zubaydah's interrogation tapes.

The American public deserves no less than the complete truth about 9/11. And those CIA officials now complicit in hiding the truth by destroying key evidence should be held responsible.

Not many answers from CIA director

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/story/227338.html

PAMELA HESS; The Associated Press
Published: December 12th, 2007 01:00 AM

WASHINGTON – CIA Director Michael Hayden, testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee behind closed doors Tuesday, failed to answer central questions about the destruction of secret videotapes showing harsh interrogation of terror suspects, the panel’s chairman said.

Sen. Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., called the committee’s 90-minute session with Hayden “a useful and not yet complete hearing” and vowed the committee would get to the bottom of the matter. Among lingering questions: Who authorized destruction of the tapes, and why wasn’t Congress told about it?

Hayden told reporters afterward that he had “a chance to lay out the narrative, the history of why the tapes were destroyed” and the process that led to that decision.

But since the tapes were made under one of his predecessors, George Tenet, and destroyed under another, Porter Goss, he wasn’t able to answer all questions, he said.

“Other people in the agency know about this far better than I,” Hayden said, and promised the committee he would make those witnesses available.

A similar session is set for today, when Hayden appears before the panel’s House counterpart.

One former senior intelligence official said Tuesday that the recordings were contained on older videocasettes, rather than modern digital tapes or disks, and that no verbatim transcripts were made. Instead, results of the interrogations were contained in classified summaries, the official said.

Hayden’s appearance followed disclosures by former CIA officer John Kiriakou who said that the use of a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding on Abu Zubaydah, a major al-Qaida figure, elicited information that “probably saved lives” but also amounted to torture.

Kiriakou’s public remarks prompted Hayden to send a reminder to CIA employees Tuesday about the importance of not disclosing classified information, intelligence officials said.

At the White House, press secretary Dana Perino said the CIA interrogation program approved by the president is safe, tough, effective and legal.

“It’s no secret that the president approved a lawful program in order to interrogate hardened terrorists,” Perino said. “We do not torture. We also know that this program has saved lives by disrupting terrorist attacks.”

Abu Zubaydah, the first high-value detainee taken by the CIA in 2002, is now being held with other detainees at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He told his interrogators about alleged 9/11 accomplice Ramzi Binalshibh, and the two men’s confessions also led to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who the U.S. government said was the mastermind behind the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The Washington Post contributed to this report.

How many court orders has this administration ignored now?

CIA destroyed tapes despite court orders

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071212/ap_on_go_co/cia_videotapes_courts;_ylt=Aux0BheePq.QXXobL16LUWKs0NUE

By MATT APUZZO, Associated Press Writer
12/12/2007

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration was under court order not to discard evidence of detainee torture and abuse months before the CIA destroyed videotapes that revealed some of its harshest interrogation tactics.

Normally, that would force the government to defend itself against obstruction allegations. But the CIA may have an out: its clandestine network of overseas prisons.

While judges focused on the detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and tried to guarantee that any evidence of detainee abuse would be preserved, the CIA was performing its toughest questioning half a world away. And by the time President Bush publicly acknowledged the secret prison system, interrogation videotapes of two terrorism suspects had been destroyed.

The CIA destroyed the tapes in November 2005. That June, U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. had ordered the Bush administration to safeguard "all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment, and abuse of detainees now at the United States Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay."

U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler issued a nearly identical order that July.

At the time, that seemed to cover all detainees in U.S. custody. But Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the terrorism suspects whose interrogations were videotaped and then destroyed, weren't at Guantanamo Bay. They were prisoners that existed off the books — and apparently beyond the scope of the court's order.

Attorneys say that might not matter. David H. Remes, a lawyer for Yemeni citizen Mahmoad Abdah and others, asked Kennedy this week to schedule a hearing on the issue.

Though Remes acknowledged the tapes might not be covered by Kennedy's order, he said, "It is still unlawful for the government to destroy evidence, and it had every reason to believe that these interrogation records would be relevant to pending litigation concerning our client."

In legal documents filed in January 2005, Assistant Attorney General Peter D. Keisler assured Kennedy that government officials were "well aware of their obligation not to destroy evidence that may be relevant in pending litigation."

For just that reason, officials inside and outside of the CIA advised against destroying the interrogation tapes, according to a former senior intelligence official involved in the matter who spoke on condition of anonymity because it is under investigation.

Exactly who signed off on the decision is unclear, but CIA director Michael Hayden told the agency in an e-mail this week that internal reviewers found the tapes were not relevant to any court case.

Remes said that decision raises questions about whether other evidence was destroyed. Abu Zubaydah's interrogation helped lead investigators to alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Remes said Abu Zubaydah may also have been questioned about other detainees. Such evidence might have been relevant in their court cases.

"It's logical to infer that the documents were destroyed in order to obstruct any inquiry into the means by which statements were obtained," Remes said.

He stopped short, however, of accusing the government of obstruction. That's just one of the legal issues that could come up in court. A judge could also raise questions about contempt of court or spoliation, a legal term for the destruction of evidence in "pending or reasonably foreseeable litigation."

Kennedy has not scheduled a hearing on the matter and the government has not filed a response to Remes' request.

Was Pelosi aware of CIA's tactics?

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/12/EDR7TS7DI.DTL

Robert Scheer, Creators Syndicate
Wednesday, December 12, 2007

When the CIA destroyed those prisoner interrogation videotapes, were they also destroying the truth about Sept. 11, 2001? After all, according to the 9/11 Commission report, the basic narrative of what happened on that day - and the nature of the enemy in this war on terror that Bush launched in response to the tragedy - comes from the CIA's account of what those prisoners told their torturers. The commission was never allowed to interview the prisoners, or speak with those who did, and was forced to rely on what the CIA was willing to relay instead.

On the matter of the existence of the tapes, we know the CIA deliberately lied, not only to the 9/11 commission, but to Congress as well. Given that the Bush administration has for six years refused those prisoners any sort of public legal exposure, why should we believe what we've been told about what may turn out to be the most important transformative event in our nation's history? On the basis of what the CIA claimed the tortured prisoners said, President Bush launched a "Global War on Terrorism," (GWOT), an endless war that threatens to bankrupt our society both financially and morally.

How important were those "key witnesses" to the 9/11 Commission report?

Check out the disclaimer on page 146 about the commission's sourcing of the main elements laid out in its narrative:

"Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members ... Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses ... is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogation took place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting. We were told that our requests might disrupt the sensitive interrogation process."

Videos were made of those "sensitive" interrogations, which were accurately described as "torture" by one of the agents involved, John Kiriakou, in an interview with ABC News. Yet when the 9/11 Commission and federal court judges specifically asked for such tapes, they were destroyed by the CIA, which then denied their existence.

Of course our president claims he knew nothing about this whitewash, and he may be speaking the truth, since plausible deniability seems to be the defining leadership style of our commander in chief.

But what about those congressional leaders who were briefed on the torture program as early as 2002? That includes Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, who has specialized in heartfelt speeches condemning torturers in faraway places like China.

Pelosi's press aide Brendan Daly told me that the Washington Post report on her CIA briefing was "overblown" because Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee thought the techniques described, which the CIA insists included waterboarding, were planned for the future and not yet in use. Pelosi claimed that "several months later" her successor as the ranking Democrat, Rep. Jane Harman of Los Angeles County, was advised the techniques "had in fact been employed" and wrote a classified letter to the CIA in protest, and Pelosi "concurred." Neither went public with her concerns.

Harman told the Washington Post "I was briefed, but the information was closely held to just the Gang of Four. I was not free to disclose anything." The "Gang of Four" is an insider reference to the top members of the House and Senate intelligence committees and not to the thugs who ran Mao's China during the Cultural Revolution.

Not only did the congressional Gang of Four fail to inform the public about the use of torture by our government but they also kept the 9/11 Commission in the dark.

Pelosi testified before the commission on May 22, 2003 but uttered not a word of caution about the methods used. However, more than two years later on Nov. 16, 2005, Pelosi stated correctly that on the basis of her "many years on the intelligence committee," she knew that "The quality of intelligence that is collected by torture is ... uncorroborated and it is worthless."

Hopefully I am missing something here, having admired Pelosi for decades, but if she and the others in the know have another version of these events, it's time to come clean. As matters now stand, they not only concealed torture but, more significantly, they abetted the waterboarding of our democracy.

Which lie should we believe? CIA admits it destroyed evidence it said didn't exist.

http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20071208163121510

by Nicholas Levis
CORRECTED & UPDATED
December 10, 2007

CIA claims it destroyed videotapes of interrogations central to the official story of September 11th. Writing in TIME magazine, former CIA agent and occasional "conspiracy theory" debunker, Robert Baer concedes that 9/11 skeptics seem all the more credible in the aftermath. Full-time debunker Gerald Posner also sees a cover-up.

The most important document in the official mythology of September 11th, The 9/11 Commission Report, is based largely on the reported statements of three prisoners: Khalid Shaikh Mohamed, Ramzi Binalshibh, and Abu Zubaydah. The Report describes these men as high-ranking members of Al Qaeda. U.S. authorities announced the captures of the three in the course of separate raids in 2002 and 2003. According to the CIA and U.S. military, they have been held ever since at "undisclosed locations," and have had contacts only with a handful of interrogators. No U.S. agency has ever produced any of them in a public proceeding, or even provided photographs of them in captivity.

Khalid Shaikh Mohamed (see entries in the "Complete 9/11 Timeline") was originally reported as killed during an attempt to capture him in Pakistan on September 10, 2002. He apparently survived, for he was reported as captured alive in March 2003. Until 2004, it was considered a security breach for a U.S. government source even to mention his name, although he was publicly identified as the "9/11 mastermind" in 2002.

The 9/11 Commission asked to see Mohamed and other prisoners, and was denied. The CIA instead provided English-language transcripts of interrogations supposedly held at the Guantanamo prison, and told the Commission no videotapes of such interrogations existed. The Commission made no fuss about this denial of access, although its report portrays Mohamed in particular as the most important planner of the September 11th plot.

The Report cites Mohamed, Binalshibh and Zubaydah uncritically as primary sources, without expressing a shred of doubt that the transcripts constitute the mens' words, that the words are genuine and unedited, or that the prisoners really are who the CIA says they are. This is despite the fact that Ernest May, one of the architects of the Report, admitted in a May 2005 memoir that the Commission "never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources." One top CIA official throws out an estimate that as much as 90 percent of information gleaned from Mohamed (or is that "Mohamed"?) is unreliable.

We learned this week that CIA videotapes of at least some of these supposed interrogations -- tapes which were previously said not to have existed! -- are now said to have been destroyed in 2005. So far the CIA has copped to destroying hundreds of hours of tapes of Abu Zubaydah and of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, also identified as an Al Qaeda leader (captured in 2002, never produced in public).

The CIA claims -- bizarrely -- that this was done to protect the identities of the interrogators (apparently the Agency's 19th-century video technology is incapable of blurring out faces or distorting voices on a tape). The corporate media floated the idea that the motive was to cover up the use of torture, possibly waterboarding. But as the "evidence" from which the official 9/11 fable lives disappears further into a black box, naturally any breathing skeptic must wonder to what extent the tapes, or even the prisoners, existed in the first place. And granting that the tapes existed, was the motive behind their destruction to hide torture, or to hide evidence? Even a defender of the official story like former CIA agent Robert Baer knows this latest twist only adds to the stink of obstruction and fakery in everything the intelligence community says about 9/11. Gerald Posner, meanwhile, finds occasion to repeat a story told to him and to other sources such as Ron Suskind (author of The One Percent Solution), of how Zubaydah was supposedly duped by the CIA into naming three Saudi princes and a Pakistani general as accomplices to the terror network. All four of these personages subsequently turned up dead, the three princes in fact killed in separate incidents within a single week.

(Thanks to Paul Thompson and KJF for assists.)

Torture tapes

http://cannonfire.blogspot.com/2007/12/torture-tapes.html

12/10/2007

When the CIA tells you that a piece of evidence has been destroyed, you should react as skeptically as you would to the death of a Marvel supervillain.

As you know, CIA Deputy Director of Operations Jose Rodriguez reportedly made the decision to destroy tapes of prisoner interrogation, allegedly to protect the identities of the interrogators. This action, we are told, ran contrary to the wishes of Porter Goss, who then ran the Agency.

According to Jon Ponder on BradBlog, a federal prosecutor reports the continued existence of either the same tapes or similar ones.


Larisa makes much the same point. This PDF gives you the actual letter from USA Rosenberg.

Larry Johnson compares the alleged destruction of these torture tapes to the "family jewels" -- a catch-all term for high-level CIA misdeeds uncovered in the 1970s. The most notorious of these "jewels" was the Agency's MKULTRA program. Richard Helms told both Congress and the CIA Inspector General that he ordered the destruction of all the voluminous documentation created by this massively-funded, cutting-edge research project. That statement was a lie. Those documents still exist.

So do the "nonexistent" interrogation tapes. Bank on it.

Added note: Here's an interesting response from "canuckjournalist," one of Larisa's readers:


Even before Posner wrote his egregious Case Closed, some folks thought that he was spookier than the Winchester mansion. His testimony to Congress on the Josef Mengele mystery was very strange, especially when compared to the reportage in his subsequent book. But that -- as I say too often -- is a tale for another time.

The idea of Saudi participation in the torture sessions is very intriguing. Let me mention another possibility: Israeli participation. We've heard odd reports of Israeli "experts" showing up at Abu Ghraib. Is it really so unthinkable to suspect that they helped in the interrogation of Zubaydah?

Don't expect Gerry to talk about that idea any time soon.

Ron Suskind has argued that Zubaydah was a minor player, a logistical "go to" guy, not a high-level planner. According to Suskind, Zubaydah is also loonier than Daffy Duck. Bush painted a very different picture, of course.

Perhaps the tapes would prove that the Suskind version is closer to the truth.