Justice Department Launches Criminal Probe Over Destroyed CIA Tapes

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.

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