Justice Department Launches Criminal Probe Over Destroyed CIA Tapes

Posted by Looseheadprop , Firedoglake at 12:07 PM on January 2, 2008.

UPDATE: John Conyers wants special counsel to investigate CIA torture tapes

BREAKING: AP via MSNBC reports that the DOJ has opened a criminal investigation regarding the destruction of the CIA interrogation tapes. As LHP points out clearly below, Mukasey has some substantive conflicts on this issue -- which raises a whole host of questions, such as the ones Glenn raises here, about the DOJ investigating this that ought to be answered, and soon. More news as we get it on this, meanwhile some exceptional analysis from LHP on obstructive behavior with the 9/11 Commission. -- CHS

Today's NYTimes Opinion section had an "Op-Ed" that is short on opinion and long on facts, it even has a time line of sorts. You know how I love time lines. This Op-Ed was authored by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton the bi-partisan co-chairs of the 9-11 Commission and, boy, does it call bulshit on the Georges: Tenet and Bush!

A little background:

MORE than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission....Soon after its creation, the president's chief of staff directed all executive branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.

The commission's mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11 plot. Those who knew about those videotapes -- and did not tell us about them -- obstructed our investigation.

Well, THAT's quite the opening salvo!

When the press reported that, in 2002 and maybe at other times, the C.I.A. had recorded hundreds of hours of interrogations of at least two Qaeda detainees, we went back to check our records. We found that we did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes

Oops, did someone at the CIA forget that the 9-11 Commission kept records?

Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently recorded and then destroyed....Agency officials assured us that, if we posed specific questions, they would do all they could to answer them.

So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.'s general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports, including those about Abu Zubaydah. A second set, even more important in our view, asked for details about the translation process in the interrogations; the background of the interrogators; the way the interrogators handled inconsistencies in the detainees' stories; the particular questions that had been asked to elicit reported information; the way interrogators had followed up on certain lines of questioning; the context of the interrogations so we could assess the credibility and demeanor of the detainees when they made the reported statements; and the views or assessments of the interrogators themselves.

The general counsel responded in writing with non-specific replies. The agency did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had held any further relevant information, in any form. Not satisfied with this response, we decided that we needed to question the detainees directly, including Abu Zubaydah and a few other key captives.

In a lunch meeting on Dec. 23, 2003, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, told us point blank that we would have no such access.

So, our intrepid Commissioners tried to go over Tenet's head to get the info.

A meeting on Jan. 21, 2004, with Mr. Tenet, the White House counsel, the secretary of defense and a representative from the Justice Department also resulted in the denial of commission access to the detainees. Once again, videotapes were not mentioned.

This led the Commission to have sufficient misgivings that they included a CYA in the report:

So the public would be aware of our concerns, we highlighted our caveats on page 146 in the commission report

So, let's get this straight. At the President's request, Congress created the 9-11 Commission, then the President's own Executive Branch and its agencies willfully and "in your face mutha" withheld information and obstructed the very investigation that the President himself had requested.

If this is not a total kick in the pants to Congress and the American people, and to the friends and relations that we New Yorkers lost when the towers collapsed, I don't know what is.

I don't know if AG Mukasey can actually investigate this because of his obvious conflict of interest, but you know who absolutely can? And who should? Yep, the very branch of government who created the 9-11 Commission and gave it the power to investigate. Yo! Congress! Enough with the recessing already--get back to work! Or at least appoint a Special Prosecutor, 'cause fellas? According to the DOJ Criminal Resource manual this might be a violation of 18 USC Section 1505 and maybe 1515 as well. Oh, and then there is Section 1001, and.......................

Well, you get the drift. The closing graph from Kean and Hamilton:

As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.'s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. What we do know is that government officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.

[ emphasis in all quotes, mine]

Tagged as: cia, torture, hamilton, 9/11 commission, justice department, tenet, mukasey, kean

Looseheadprop is a regular blogger for FireDogLake