CIA Destroyed Tapes as Judge Sought Interrogation Data
WASHINGTON - At the time that the Central Intelligence Agency destroyed videotapes of the interrogations of operatives of Al Qaeda, a federal judge was still seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of one of those operatives, Abu Zubaydah, according to court documents made public on Wednesday.
The court documents, filed in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, appear to contradict a statement last December by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director, that when the tapes were destroyed in November 2005 they had no relevance to any court proceeding, including Mr. Moussaoui’s criminal trial.
It was already known that the judge in the case, Leonie M. Brinkema, had not been told about the existence or destruction of the videos. But the newly disclosed court documents, which had been classified as secret, showed the judge had still been actively seeking information about Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation as late as Nov. 29, 2005.
The destruction of the tapes is under investigation by the Justice Department and Congress.
One of the documents, a motion filed by Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers to the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, cites several instances in 2005, including one after the videotapes were apparently destroyed, when government lawyers produced documents to the court that came from the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah.
The document states that on Nov. 29, 2005, government lawyers produced documents, including “intelligence summaries,” about Abu Zubaydah but never told the court about the existence or destruction of the tapes.
A response that was filed to the appeals court by federal prosecutors remains classified, government officials said. Mr. Moussaoui was convicted of terrorism-related charges in 2006, and the government officials said that last month an appellate judge had denied a motion by his lawyers, who argued that the destruction of the C.I.A. tapes meant the Moussaoui case should be sent back to a district court.
The tapes destroyed by the C.I.A. documented the interrogation of Mr. Zubaydah and a second Qaeda operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, according to current and former intelligence officials.
After The New York Times notified C.I.A. officials in December that it intended to publish an article about the destruction of the tapes, General Hayden issued a statement to employees.
In it, General Hayden said he understood that the tapes were destroyed “only after it was determined they were no longer of intelligence value and not relevant to any internal, legislative or judicial inquiries - including the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui.”
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said Wednesday: “The rulings in this case are clear, and the director stands by his statement. Nothing has changed.” A Justice Department spokesman, Dean Boyd, said he could not comment on the unsealed documents.
It is unclear whether the C.I.A. notified federal prosecutors in the Moussaoui case about the existence and destruction of the tapes before the matter became public. But one of the documents released Wednesday, a letter from Chuck Rosenberg, United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, said a prosecutor in the Moussaoui case “may have been told in late February or early March 2006″ about the Abu Zubaydah videotapes, but “does not recall being told this information.”
The papers made public on Wednesday were filed in the appeal of Mr. Moussaoui, who was sentenced to life in prison by Judge Brinkema, of the Eastern District of Virginia, in May 2006. The documents were filed in December under seal and made public this week with some redactions.
Mr. Moussaoui attended a flight school in Oklahoma in 2001 but was arrested in Minnesota on immigration charges before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He admitted in 2005 to participating in terrorist plotting with Al Qaeda.
The new documents also raised new questions about a letter sent to Judge Brinkema in October by prosecutors in the Moussaoui case.
In that letter, prosecutors acknowledged that two declarations filed in the case by C.I.A. officials were inaccurate. The C.I.A. officials had denied the existence of video or audiotapes of interviews of certain Qaeda suspects, but the letter said the C.I.A. in fact had two videotapes and one audiotape of interrogations.
Intelligence officials have said the three tapes, which still exist, are separate from the hundreds of hours of videotape of Abu Zubaydah and Mr. Nashiri that were destroyed. It is unclear why the October letter did not mention those tapes or their destruction.
© 2008 The New York Times
As I’ve said elsewhere, the end must be near if our leaders cannot keep their stories straight - or even feel a need to do so.
I know this is a rhetorical question that’s already been asked many times before, but why are there no prosecutions of the people responsible for the obvious destruction of evidence?
destruction of evidence is now legal, you see.
that’s how the bush administration works.
if we do it, it’s legal.
and if it’s not, we’ll use a signing statement to say it is.
” curmudgeon99 February 7th, 2008 2:46 pm
As I’ve said elsewhere, the end must be near if our leaders cannot keep their stories straight - or even feel a need to do so.”
ONLY, THERE’S LITTLE THAT’S CHANGED; THERE’S LITTLE THAT’S NEW about voters’ “leaders” not being able to “keep their stories straight”.
For one early Cheney-Bush example, remember that they claimed (hegemoniously, hypocritically, …) justification for war on the Taliban after saying that they had had absolutely nothing to do with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the USA; only having criminally pretended that the Taliban’s association with Osama (Usama) Bin Ladin and Al Qa’ida sufficed, while the UNSC correctly refused to authorise the war on the Taliban?! Well, also remember that the Cheney-Bush administration never really made any serious efforts at all to try to find and catpure UBL, aka OBL?!
They didn’t keep any part of their overall Global War OF Terror on the world right, and this was as of Sept. 11, 2001. After all, law doesn’t permit war on a whole govt just because the govt in question has some relations with some supposed terrorist leader and group in the same country. And much more can be and has been written about this; all freely available on the Internet, while there are also whole books, etc., on all or much of all of this.
They’ve been major liars throughout, and it’s always been very obvious that they were lying and therefore acting criminally, etc. They rarely, if ever did, “keep their stories straight”.
But maybe we’ll start to witness some real turning of the tides, now; although I doubt that we will. And if we do start or seem to start to have such changes, then remember that there are elections in November, …; keep alert about the possibility that apparently good changes often are only political acting for dishonest purposes.
After all, if they truly care about the torture crimes of the U.S. govt, then there’s absolutely no way to excuse their refusal to act on the facts that the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan are both illegal and far consequentially worse than the torture, which nonetheless needs to be stopped (including with due compensation provided to the victims and their families). I am definitely against the torture, but the wars themselves dwarf what the criminal torture of GW-of-T detainees and by the U.S. govt represents.
” jcrochford February 7th, 2008 3:03 pm
I know this is a rhetorical question that’s already been asked many times before, but why are there no prosecutions of the people responsible for the obvious destruction of evidence?”
THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A NEED FOR SUCH QUESTIONING, for the answer is obvious. Questioning is fitting when the answer is not obvious, and if we miss that, then the question to ask is, “Why aren’t people seeing what is very obvious? And why are some of these people additionally [refusing] to acknowledge ‘the obvious’, instead of living as if not seeing it?”.
F.e., it’s obvious that even Obama is very, strongly unfit for the presidency, because he already is provably war criminal, as well as being criminal against human rights and life in other ways; but his supporters either don’t see this (while it still [is] obvious), or they don’t care about trying to elect yet another war criminal, etc., presidency. (I think there’s some combination of both of those reasons among all of his present supporters.)
Prosecutions of criminal members of U.S. politics and the real ruling elites, since when does this happen more than [very] seldomly, while when it does, in these very few cases, the whole prosecution serves as a sort of whitewashing or cover-up of far worse criminality of the U.S. govt and its ruling elites.
There are NO prosecutions of Cheney, Bush, and many others, for their totally criminal wars of aggression, which were so obviously unjustifiable and therefore criminal that the UNSC refused to authorise both of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan; all while many hundreds of millions of people around this planet minimally opposed the war on Iraq.
Kucinich’s impeachment bill against Cheney is getting so little real support that there’s no point in him trying to do the same thing against Bush!
There have been no prosecutions against the Cheney-Bush administration for destroying and causing serious genocidal death, etc., in Iraq.
There have been no prosecutions against them for the totally criminal act-of-war coup d’etat against Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s govt, who the U.S. still refuses to allow to return to the legitimate presidency he was elected to by The People of Haiti.
There have been no prosecutions of the U.S.A.’s totally criminal role against the populations of Palestine and Lebanon, as well as against the populations in several African countries, among others.
There are no prosecutions against the Cheney-Bush administration for their criminal usurpation of U.S. and intl laws.
There are no prosecutions against war criminal Bill Clinton.
Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
And it’s [all] obvious! It’s not a question of whether or not the crimininality is very obvious; it’s a question of citizens being about as irresponsible, callous, etc., as they can make of themselves (and their families)!
SO, WHAT’S THE SURPRISE about lack of justified (strongly so) prosecutions?
What would be surprising, including [very], would be the U.S. finally siding with legitimate laws and prosecuting its MANY war criminals, and its many other criminals against Humanity in all other many respects.
It’d be surprising that they’d prosecute over the torture matter when they don’t pay any real care on the far greater crimes of the wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, what was done against Haitians and their govt, what’s done to Palestinians and Lebanese, etc., etc.
Any and all work on the torture criminality without there being an even stronger work or effort made to stop the far greater crimes is indicative of what? Maybe it’s all just like, “The whole world is a stage”, and there are many acts that happen on this stage; many for the very deliberate purposes of self-denial and to distract (and (thereby) deceive).
Very likely, they won’t prosecute against the crimes of torture. It’ll more likely end up having distracted USA’ians from the need to focus on stopping the whole and damn GW-of-T(-of-USA-et al). Achieve the latter, and you’re basically sure of also achieving the former; try the opposite way and all you’ll most surely likely do is WASTE YOUR TIME. It’ ain’t going anywhere, such skewedly based effort; or if it seems to achieve some success, then BEWARE, don’t let it be like them pulling sheets over your eyes.
In relative terms, the torture crimes are [”small-time stuff”]. All of these crimes need to be stopped, and for reparations to be provided; but the torture and despotic detainment of innocent people doesn’t come close to comparing to what has been and continues to be done to Iraqis, Afghans, Haitians, Africans, and so on.
I’m totally against the torture, and the despotic, … abduction, detainment and renditioning of people who are innocent in the whole and damn GW-of-T “affair”; just that referring to these crimes of the U.S. govt is not something I’d ever want to do while omitting to seriously mention the far graver and ever-ongoing crimes of the same govt.
The U.S. politicians focused on the torture crimes are either deliberately neglecting the far worse crimes of the same govt, or they’re too ‘dumb animal’ to be electable, qualified to serve in public office.
Them and the media, I DO NOT TRUST!
Beware! There’s something sickeningly wrong with this whole “picture”.
No curmudgeon99, the end is not near, rather we are f*&%#ed because the Reps are shredding our constitution and the Dems and enabling them, but most importantly, so called progressives are supporting the Bush-enabling Dems in droves. Good night.
The NY Times article about the destruction of the waterboarding tapes of three “high value” al Quaeda detainees - Khalid Sheik Mohammed, Zubaydah, and Nashiri - follows up on the major briefing given the Senate Intelligence Committee earlier this week in which the CIA formally declared those three were the only prisoners ever waterboarded as part of the war on terror.
The same day this NYT story ran, the Washington Post covered the same story and it’s account contained the following passage that should not slip by unnoticed:
“After the hearing, [CIA Director] Hayden told reporters that the information obtained from those detainees amounted to a quarter of all the human intelligence the CIA gained about the [al Quaeda] terrorist organization between 2002 and 2006.” Washington Post, 2/7/08.
Feeling safer yet?
Bill from Saginaw