9/11 Panel Study Finds That C.I.A. Withheld Tapes
WASHINGTON — A review of classified documents by former members of the Sept. 11 commission shows that the panel made repeated and detailed requests to the Central Intelligence Agency in 2003 and 2004 for documents and other information about the interrogation of operatives of Al Qaeda, and were told by a top C.I.A. official that the agency had “produced or made available for review” everything that had been requested.
The review was conducted earlier this month after the disclosure that in November 2005, the C.I.A. destroyed videotapes documenting the interrogations of two Qaeda operatives.
A seven-page memorandum prepared by Philip D. Zelikow, the panel’s former executive director, concluded that “further investigation is needed” to determine whether the C.I.A.’s withholding of the tapes from the commission violated federal law.
In interviews this week, the two chairmen of the commission, Lee H. Hamilton and Thomas H. Kean, said their reading of the report had convinced them that the agency had made a conscious decision to impede the Sept. 11 commission’s inquiry.
Mr. Kean said the panel would provide the memorandum to the federal prosecutors and congressional investigators who are trying to determine whether the destruction of the tapes or withholding them from the courts and the commission was improper.
A C.I.A. spokesman said that the agency had been prepared to give the Sept. 11 commission the interrogation videotapes, but that commission staff members never specifically asked for interrogation videos.
The review by Mr. Zelikow does not assert that the commission specifically asked for videotapes, but it quotes from formal requests by the commission to the C.I.A. that sought “documents,” “reports” and “information” related to the interrogations.
Mr. Kean, a Republican and a former governor of New Jersey, said of the agency’s decision not to disclose the existence of the videotapes, “I don’t know whether that’s illegal or not, but it’s certainly wrong.” Mr. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, said that the C.I.A. “clearly obstructed” the commission’s investigation.
A copy of the memorandum, dated Dec. 13, was obtained by The New York Times.
Among the statements that the memorandum suggests were misleading was an assertion made on June 29, 2004, by John E. McLaughlin, the deputy director of central intelligence, that the C.I.A. “has taken and completed all reasonable steps necessary to find the documents in its possession, custody or control responsive” to formal requests by the commission and “has produced or made available for review” all such documents.
Both Mr. Kean and Mr. Hamilton expressed anger after it was revealed this month that the tapes had been destroyed. However, the report by Mr. Zelikow gives them new evidence to buttress their views about the C.I.A.’s actions and is likely to put new pressure on the Bush administration over its handling of the matter. Mr. Zelikow served as counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from 2005 to the end of 2006.
In an interview on Friday, Mr. McLaughlin said that agency officials had always been candid with the commission, and that information from the C.I.A. proved central to their work.
“We weren’t playing games with them, and we weren’t holding anything back,” he said. The memorandum recounts a December 2003 meeting between Mr. Kean, Mr. Hamilton and George J. Tenet, then the director of central intelligence. At the meeting, it says, Mr. Hamilton told Mr. Tenet that the C.I.A. should provide all relevant documents “even if the commission had not specifically asked for them.”
According to the memorandum, Mr. Tenet responded by alluding to several documents that he thought would be helpful to the commission, but made no mention of existing videotapes of interrogations.
The memorandum does not draw any conclusions about whether the withholding of the videotapes was unlawful, but it notes that federal law penalizes anyone who “knowingly and willfully” withholds or “covers up” a “material fact” from a federal inquiry or makes “any materially false statement” to investigators.
Mark Mansfield, the C.I.A. spokesman, said that the agency had gone to “great lengths” to meet the commission’s requests, and that commission members had been provided with detailed information obtained from interrogations of agency detainees.
“Because it was thought the commission could ask about the tapes at some point, they were not destroyed while the commission was active,” Mr. Mansfield said.
Intelligence officials have said the tapes that were destroyed documented hundreds of hours of interrogations during 2002 of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects who were taken into C.I.A. custody that year.
According to the memorandum from Mr. Zelikow, the commission’s interest in obtaining accounts from Qaeda detainees in C.I.A. custody grew out of its attempt to reconstruct the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks in the United States.
Its requests for documents from the C.I.A. began in June 2003, when it first sought intelligence reports describing information obtained from prisoner interrogations, the memorandum said. It later made specific requests for documents, reports and information related to the interrogations of specific prisoners, including Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri.
In December 2003, the commission staff sought permission to interview the prisoners themselves, but was permitted instead to give questions to C.I.A. interrogators, who then posed the questions to the detainees. The commission concluded its work in June 2004, and in its final report, it praised several agencies, including the C.I.A., for their assistance.
Abbe D. Lowell, a veteran Washington lawyer who has defended clients accused of making false statements and of contempt of Congress, said the question of whether the agency had broken the law by omitting mention of the videotapes was “pretty complex,” but said he “wouldn’t rule it out.”
Because the requests were not subpoenas issued by a court or Congress, C.I.A. officials could not be held in contempt for failing to respond fully, Mr. Lowell said. Apart from that, however, it is a crime to make a false statement “in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative or judicial branch.”
The Sept. 11 commission received its authority from both the White House and Congress.
On Friday, the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee sent a letter to Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey and to Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, asking them to preserve and produce to the committee all remaining video and audio recordings of “enhanced interrogations” of detainees in American custody.
Signed by Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, the letter asked for an extensive search of the White House, C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies to determine whether any other recordings existed of interrogation techniques “including but not limited to waterboarding.”
Government officials have said that the videos destroyed in 2005 were the only recordings of interrogations made by C.I.A. operatives, although in September government lawyers notified a federal judge in Virginia that the agency had recently found three audio and video recordings of detainees.
Intelligence officials have said that those tapes were not made by the C.I.A., but by foreign intelligence services.
Scott Shane contributed reporting.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
The mountain of objective evidence unseen, unlooked-at by the 9/11 Omission is the tip of a planet-sized pyramid….The Bible is its only rival as a monument raised in absolute omission and defiance of demonstrable fact…
The 9/11 commission was itself just another fraud to sucker gullable Americans. It’s job was to obfuscate and confuse.
I hope that history will uncover the real truth of what happened on 9/11/2001 and the perps and their accessories will be forever reviled throughout recorded history.
I hope someday to have a real and honest government that will do a real and honest investigation of 9/11.
In my opinion there is no doubt that 9/11 was an inside job.
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/unsanam2
We will need a lot of help to stop the bleeding. It’s too late to do it alone.
PLEASE HELP!!!
Building 7 was a 47 story steel-framed high-rise at the WTC. It was not hit by an airplane. It collapsed in controlled demolition form in free fall speed.
It housed offices for the Securities and Exchange Commission, CIA, Secret Service and other government agencies.
And yet no mention of Building 7 in the Official Nine- Eleven Commission Report.
And no mention of Building 7 from the mainstream media since Nine-Eleven.
Coincidences? I think not.
wexlerwantshearings.com
Nixon was to be impeached so he resigned. Clinton faced impeachment over something ridiculous.
Yet there has been enough reason to not only impeach the Bush Crime Family but to have them sentenced to life….
Can anyone tell me why that hasnt happened?
Wasn’t the original idea that we have a transparent form of government? Or has that also become quaint? Things feel way out of control right now.
Looks like we finally have George Tenet in our sights.
The tapes were no doubt destroyed in an attempt to shield Bush, Cheney et al. from prosecution as war criminals. Torture is a war crime, these tapes showed the CIA (under orders from Bush et al.) torturing people, therefore they had to be destroyed. It is not surprising. What IS surprising is the feigned shock by the people who conducted the mock investigation of the so-called prewar “intelligence failures”. This is all farce; a public show so that we may be encouraged to believe that the system is really fundamentally honest. The New York Times is one of the official perpetrators if this nonsense.
I can’t help but think that this period in our history is akin to Argentina or Chile during their Junta years. Perhaps we have our own Truth and Reconciliation Commission to look forward to after the Oil Oligarchy falls.
Out of control? Depends on who you think should be in control. The people who are committing these crimes certainly don’t think we (the great unwashed masses) should have any control at all. Bush, referring the the U.S. Constitution as a “God*mned piece of paper” finds it a minor inconvenience. He is not the first to see it this way, but he seems to be taking his belief in elite control of everything farther then anyone else has to date.
To understand the current darkness, we have to know how we got here. Everyone should read Zinn’s “Peoples History of the United States,” and Chomsky’s “Manufacturing Consent”.
Bush’s rule smacks of extreme hubris. And the Greeks knew what followed hubris.
Elvis may be dead, ___ but Hitler isn’t.
I speak as one outside the US. What would be almost humorous, if it weren’t so bitterly sad, is the liberal sorts in the US who are shocked that such crimes perpetrated by the US executive, congress, and judiciary could apply to American citizens. Why does it not occur to them to wonder why crimes of the American government should be allowed to be committed against non-Americans.
At any rate, I and many like me will be waiting long after Americans have forgotten the sad incidents, for an accounting from those who have denied habeas corpus to our children who have had little direct personal cause to resent the US before now. No, they do not have to wait to be kidnapped before they have such cause. If they did, then habeas corpus would never have been the concern of anyone with cause to care. The injury is in the denial, and that has basically received the nod from American “liberals” as well as conservatives.
The distruction of those tapes is just another validation that democracy is dead in America. In real democracies you have accountability! Instead, Americans live in a well orcahestrated illusion of democracy that makes us all warm and fuzzy. In 08 we will once again elect another holly-roller, bible-totting, corporate sponcored, lieing, fence-straddling politician then wonder what went wrong. We all knew what the Bush administration was when we elected him THE SECOND TIME!
Philip Zelikow is one of the men who provided the ideological foundations behind the 9/11 false flag attacks. He co-authored a paper for Foreign Affairs, the journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in which he imagines the “catastrophic event” and what changes would probably take place in America in the aftermath (you can read it yourself here:
http://www.foreignaffairs.org/19981101faessay1434/ashton-b-carter-john-deutch-philip-zelikow/catastrophic-terrorism-tackling-the-new-danger.html
It is high time to start bringing characters like Zelikow before congressional committees and place them under oath. In addition to Zelikow, we should force Bush and Cheney to testify again, under oath this time, about 9/11 SEPARATELY (if you recall, the Bush regime fought against investigating 9/11 for a while before submitting; they just wanted us to accept their narrative and scoot along!). Let’s also question developer Larry Silverstein, the leaseholder on the WTC complex who’d signed an insurance policy protecting the buildings specifically against acts of terrorism only months before 9/11.
The man in the bunker under the White House on 9/11 who asked Cheney if “the orders still stand” (Cheney answered angrily in the affirmative) some tough questions under oath. What were those “orders” specifically? Norman Mineta testified (under oath) to witnessing this exchange between Cheney and the unidentified man on the morning of 9/11, and some answers are in order.
The 9/11 attacks were clearly carried out by actors inside the US (those who had the means and the motive to do it); the evidence for it is definitive. The more questions asked of people around 9/11 (let’s get Rudy Guiliani under oath as well), the more the official lie begins to unravel even further. The people who believe that 9/11 was an inside job will never rest until those really responsible are held to account. The Bush regime is destroying everything that made this country unique (at least in word), going about implementing their neo-conservative plans with reckless abandon, regardless of public opinion.
Those of us on the left shouldn’t be afraid to question 9/11. Too many on the left (like the folks at the Nation magazine, Cockburn at Counterpunch, the Progressive magazine, Chomsky) are afraid they’ll be labeled “crazy” or “nutty” if they admitted what would be easily discovered should they allow themselves to realize that the alternative theory set forth by the 9/11 truth people is the most plausible and realistic description of 9/11. They think we should only focus on the symptoms of the disease (abridged civil liberties, unending racist wars, torture, concentration camps, massive shift of our resources to the military and military-related industries, the unconstitutional PATRIOT Act, creation of the fascist-sounding “Homeland” Security Dept.) instead of focussing on killing the disease itself.
Sure there are some right-wingers in the 9/11 truth movement who have ideas I can’t hang with, but what we have in common is much more fundamental than our myriad differences. I think whether you are left or right, you can both agree that regardless of which direction we go in the future, we BOTH don’t want it to go the way the fascists around Bush would have it.
Open your mind and take it seriously folks. The truth may be unsettling, but it’s hard to ignore.
Reichsta…..?
amandla—here here!!! What’s it gonna take? Not sure but it’s gonna happen. I can feel it in my bones.
www.wexlerwantshearings.com
Those of us outside the US who don’t get a vote and those in the US who vote in rigged elections need to do something more than complain.
ColdWarBaby said
http://www.petitionspot.com/petitions/unsanam2
We will need a lot of help to stop the bleeding. It’s too late to do it alone.
PLEASE HELP!!!”
This is a petition to the UN to sanction the US until it stops behaving as a rogue state.
It’s a good start - make your voice heard!
There are no checks and balances during the reign of fascist rulers such as what the U.S. is experiencing now. The so-called opposition party — the Democrats — are complicit with everything the fascist dictatorship is doing.
The only Democrats I’d consider voting for are John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, and Mike Gravel.
Nostradamus predicted Bush would be impeached. It seems the only thing this teflon administration could be busted on is something as big as a 9/11 conspiracy.
The more they keep doing this, the more — it seems — we don’t have to put up with them. They’re so far removed from rule of law that they’re working themselves into their own corner.
Leaders lead strictly by example or by tyranny. If the example is that laws are for sissies, eventually this will gain widespread popular traction. Many military/spook innovations are eventually spun-off to the civilian sector. Will lawlessness be the next one?