Mark Mazzetti at the New York Times has the story on the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes:
...The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in C.I.A. custody — to severe interrogation techniques....
...The existence and subsequent destruction of the tapes are likely to reignite the debate over the use of severe interrogation techniques on terror suspects, and their destruction raises questions about whether C.I.A. officials withheld information from the courts and from the presidentially appointed Sept. 11 commission about aspects of the program....
...The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
C.I.A. lawyers told federal prosecutors in 2003 and 2005, who relayed the information to a federal court in the Moussaoui case, that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge in the case....
...Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes existed until 2005.
“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission....
...Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Al Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes being destroyed.
If tapes were destroyed, he said, “it’s a big deal, it’s a very big deal,” because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations....
...John Radsan, who worked as a C.I.A. lawyer from 2002 to 2004 and is now a professor at William Mitchell College of Law, said the destruction of the tapes could carry serious legal penalties.
“If anybody at the C.I.A. hid anything important from the Justice Department, he or she should be prosecuted under the false statement statute,” he said.
A former intelligence official who was briefed on the issue said the videotaping was ordered as a way of assuring “quality control” at remote sites following reports of unauthorized interrogation techniques. He said the tapes, along with still photographs of interrogations, were destroyed after photographs of abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib became public in May 2004 and C.I.A. officers became concerned about a possible leak of the videos and photos....
4 comments:
The video tapes are of harsh interrogations of Abu Zubaydah. What's interesting is that:
(1) Zubaydah was determined to be mentally ill, and nothing of the big cheese they assumed he was, see Barton Gellman's review of Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine on the Washington Post, June 20, 2006.
(2) NOTHING of intel value was obtained from Zubaydah UNTIL a more "even-handed" approach was taken, i.e., TALKING, see The Forgotten Story of Abu Zubaydah, on the Columbia Journalism Review, Sept 7, 2006, by Paul McLeary, discussing Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine. Just by talking with him, Zubaydah gave up (supposedly) Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.
(3) The Feds already KNEW about Ramzi Binalshibh: the chief of the FBI's financial crimes section already testified about him before Congress A MONTH BEFORE Zubaydah's capture in Pakistan. See CBS News, June 6, 2002: The One They Didn't Let In.
(4) In June of 2002, Ramzi bin al-Shibh gave an extensive interview to al-Jazeera, and shortly after al-Jazeera announced its broadcast date of the audiotape (to be broadcast on September 12, 2002), "a Pakistani SWAT team -- on the anniversary of 9/11 -- stormed bin al-Shibh's apartment, arresting him after a violent struggle." See Joel Mawbray's excellent December 23, 2002 National Review article, currently available on FindArticles - here.
What did the torture of Zubaydah accomplish?
(1) He was the first supposed high-value target capture, the first to be renditioned to a secret prison, the first bogey man to be held up by Bush as "one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States." It was necessary to keep the fear going, as plans were in the works in 2002 for the war on Iraq (see the Washington Post's War Plan For Iraq Is Ready, November 10, 2002).
(2)It gave the Administration the ability to "cry wolf" whenever there was something in the press that made them uncomfortable. Example: Time Magazine still has their May 20, 2002 article up on the web about Abu Zubaydah Warns Again, where the FBI issued yet another terrorism alert - "to tighten security around large apartment buildings, as well as busy malls, supermarkets and restaurants".
What happened right before that to act as catalyst for that "WOLF!"
(2-i) From the 9/11 Encyclopedia - "In May 2002, Dr. Tyrone Powers, former FBI agent and terrorism expert, stated the White House could have thwarted the 911 attacks. In an interview with host Amy Holmes of BET, he said: 'Let me be clear on this, I believe that enough information reached the WH, where the WH could have thwarted that particular attack by hardening the target at the airport.' Powers was a respected veteran of the Maryland State Police, spent nine years as an FBI agent, with posting in Cincinnati and Detroit." On May 19, Powers was even bolder, (from Mike Rupert's From the Wilderness site - quoting indymedia.org): "Former FBI Agent Tyrone Powers, now a professor at Anne Arundel Community College states on radio station KISS 98.7 that he has credible evidence suggesting that the Bush Administration did in fact allow the Sept. 11 attacks to further a hidden agenda."
(2-ii) On May 16, 2002, White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer admitted that Bush had been warned prior to 9/11 of possible hijackings (from Mike Rupert's From the Wilderness site - quoting CBS News).
By Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane have an update on The International Herald Tribune today:
"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 Al Qaeda lieutenants, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.
"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 CIA officials had continued to press the White House for a firm decision, and that the CIA 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.'
"...In a related legal action, lawyers representing 11 inmates of the American military detention center at Guantanamo 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 CIA'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 U.S. District Court in Washington, required the government to 'preserve and maintain all evidence and information regarding the torture, mistreatment and abuse of detainees' at Guantanamo. That preservation order, one of several issued in Guantanamo cases, may be relevant to the CIA videotapes, Remes said. He noted that the government has said that 'a senior al-Qaida lieutenant' reported seeing one of his Guantanamo 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 Remes, of the law firm Covington & Burling. 'The CIA had every reason to believe the videotapes would be relevant down the road.'"
Richard B. Schmitt at the Los Angeles Times today also has a great article, and brings up a salient point --
"... As a general matter, government agencies, like other institutions and individuals, are under a legal obligation to preserve relevant documents and information once it becomes apparent that they are of interest to official proceedings.
"That legal principle has been established over the years and has been borne out in such cases as the Iran-Contra arms-for-hostages scandal during the Reagan administration and the 2002 indictment and conviction of accounting giant Arthur Andersen in the Enron debacle. Under the law, destruction of documents can be a form of obstruction of justice.
"On Monday, a federal appeals court in New York heard arguments in an appeal by defendants in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa who are challenging their conviction, in part on grounds that prosecutors failed to turn over the videotaped interrogation of a prime government witness.
"In the view of many, the intense national interest in U.S. detention policies since the Sept. 11 attacks should have given the CIA fair warning that the interrogation tapes should have been preserved, not destroyed.
"'They knew we wanted to see those guys,' said Daniel Marcus, the former general counsel of the commission and now a professor at American University law school in Washington.
"'We may never have said the magic words' and specifically requested videotapes, he said. 'But we made clear we wanted the best available evidence of what happened.'
"But the Sept. 11 commission case also shows that such questions are a close call. The panel, appointed by the president and Congress, never specifically requested taped interviews. And all of its communications with the CIA were done on an informal basis rather than through subpoena.
"That could militate against a finding of agency liability.
"The Supreme Court in 2005 overturned the conviction of Arthur Andersen on the grounds that the government did not prove the firm destroyed documents with the intent of obstructing justice.
"Andersen had argued that shredding documents was part of its document management system...."
The 9/11 Commission never subpoened the tapes - all communications with CIA were informal.
However, the MOUSSAOUI case DID make formal requests "for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners" (see Mazzetti's "C.I.A. Destroyed Tapes of Interrogations", 12-06-07 on NYTimes).
Its not clear if those FORMAL requests were subpoena's or not.... perhaps not ... Zelikow uses the SAME language to describe the 9/11 Commission's requests.
And there was one audio tape too.
But it looks like this is another "play" being enacted in the public for the purposes of distraction.
Court orders Bush administration to preserve possible evidence of torture
- Carol Rosenberg, McClatchy Newspapers
"A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., issued a preliminary order on Tuesday directing the Bush administration to preserve any evidence that might show that a former Baltimore resident was tortured during his three years in secret CIA detention.
"The order, by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, gave the government until Dec. 20 to respond to a court filing last week that accused the CIA of torturing Majid Khan, 27.
"Khan is among 15 high-value detainees who once were held by the CIA but are now in military custody at the prison camp for suspected terrorists at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"Khan's lawyers requested the court action last week, after CIA Director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of two other Guantanamo detainees who, like Khan, had spent years in secret CIA custody.
"Khan, who was a legal U.S. resident and graduated from a suburban Baltimore high school, hasn't been charged with a crime. Pentagon officials claim that he was assigned by the reputed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, to research 'the poisoning of U.S. water reservoirs and the possibility of blowing up gas stations.'
"Of the 15 captives formerly held by the CIA, only Khan has been allowed to see his attorneys.
Based on the meetings, his attorneys claimed in a 25-page motion that there was ample proof that their client had been tortured, and they asked the appeals court to order that evidence be preserved. Under the Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last year, the Washington appeals court is the only civilian court with jurisdiction to hear detainee issues.
"It's impossible to verify the attorneys' claims independently. Intelligence officers blacked out major portions of their filing before it was released publicly...."
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