9/11 Panel Study Finds That C.I.A. Withheld Tapes

[Eugene]

Source: New York Times

9/11 Panel Study Finds That C.I.A. Withheld Tapes

By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: December 22, 2007

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.

-snip-

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/22/washington/22intel.html?_r=1&ref=world&oref=slogin

[wellst0nev0ter]

1. Sorry, I Forget

was the 9-11 panel useful for anything?

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

12. Hamilton and Kean also impeded the investigation.

The answer to your question is "yes." It provided political cover for the PTB. Threadbare though that cover may be.

[dmosh42]

2. This is truly the "War Criminal Administration"! n/t

[ingac70]

3. Off course they were withheld....

If you will remember, the 9-11 Commission more or less cleared Saudi Arabia of any involvement.... and the one of the guys tortured in the CIA videos gave up the names of THREE Saudi Princes and the head of intel in Saudi Arabia as those behind 9-11.

[AntiFascist]

27. The Administration is truly compromised by its relationship with Saudi Arabia...

In the Federal government, not only are Democratic leaders afraid to take on the Republicans, but the Republicans are afraid to take on the Saudis, particularly the Bush cabal which has such a close and intimate relationship. How deep does the corruption go? Not only are the names of high-level Saudis involved in 9-11 covered up, but so is the money trail. Is it conceivable that the money laundering, drug and arms trading network of corruption leading back to Poppy Bush is part of the problem?

[thecrow]

4. HMM..What happens when the CIA breaks federal law?

A great question for our Constitutional experts!

What do you mean the CIA is not in the Constitution???
Shouldn't it be if it's doing things like torturing people?

[Solly Mack]

5. snort

[Rageneau]

6. Wen laws are outlawed, only outlaws will have laws.

[JGShaw]

7. CIA WITHHELD 9-11 TAPES?

While they are at it perhaps they can explain a few other pieces of information, including missing recordings.

A. International private investigator, LARRY W. BOWMAN PH. D., given details of attack plans in Korea in 1997.

B. Danny Carey of Stuart, Florida given details of attack plans in 1998, Danny Carey of the sheriff department.

C. The 911 number of STUART, Florida told of terrorists in area planning attacks and using airplanes, early in 2001.

D. Officer of the state, Osborne, given details of coming attacks in early 2001.

NONE bothered to follow up or investigate. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to do.

[Twist_U_Up]

8. What are they hiding? This demands a new investigation into 911

- The Bush connection to the bin Laden family.

- Escorting dozens of members of the bin Laden family out of US after 9/11

- The Patriot Act having been written decades before 9/11

- The call for a ‘new Pearl Harbor’ by the neocons who orchestrated the wars

- A totally invalid and false connection between Iraq and the ‘War on Terror

- Regular, politically timed terror alerts

- Toxic air quality at Ground Zero after 9/11

- The ‘junk science’ of Global Warming and its effects around the globe

- WH orders to suppress and politicize reports on by the Surgeon General

- Plans for wars with Iraq and Afghanistan that were made before 9/11

- Saddam Hussein’s possession of WMD

- Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al Qaeda

- Saddam Hussein’s involvement in 9/11

- Saddam Hussein’s threat to the US or his neighbors

- Having NO plans for an extended occupation of Iraq or for keeping the peace

- Inadequate armor and supplies for our men and women in uniform

- Supposed ‘progress’ in Iraq, time after time

- Fudged numbers of civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq

- The staged ‘toppling’ of Saddam’s statue

- The staged rescue of Jessica Lynch

- The lies about Pat Tillman’s death by friendly fire

- Illegal warrantless spying on US citizens

- Torture at Abu Ghraib and other prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan

- Rendition of detainees to other countries for torture

- Outing Valerie Plame as a CIA operative

- White House involvement in the firing of federal prosecutors…

There are so many more lies to list, but I think you get the idea.

[Broadslidin]

9. Obviously, C.I.A. ghouls were Enjoying an Act of Torture Straight out of the Inquisition.

Whether clandestine CIA or Gestapo operations,
both dutifully administered by members of our blood revenge specie.

Any subsequent U.S. Imperial Empire investigation whispers
will occur quietly in the red glow of a sub-basement bunker.

[pleah]

10. They'll just investigate the hell out of it and do nothing. Damn them.

[mod mom]

22. Nonsense...they'll write a stern letter.

:sarcasm:

[Floyd53]

11. We've been waterboarding the wrong people

When this story first broke I didn't even bother to read it. All the talking heads and their guests had driven me into hiding. I didn't want to hear another word about the legality of torture. Now I realize this article has nothing to do with torture, it's about treason at the highest level. Looks like we've been waterboarding the wrong people.

I want to see another investigation of Building 7. http://911research.wtc7.net/wtc/attack/wtc7.html

The American people need to know the truth. We were attacked by our own people.

[fascisthunter]

13. WE NEED A NEW 911 INVESTIGATION Open to the PUBLIC!!!

DUers, ask yourselves WHY they destroyed the tapes. Do you want to live in a country where the very people who are trying to protect you are possibly deliberately placing you in danger?

[disndat]

14. The NYTimes is

to be commended for bringing out the points in this article. They are the only member of BIG Media to do so, besides Keith Olbermann. The NY Times have been complicit in the past with stories by Judith Miller and others, but people who are seeking th truth can usually find it in the NYT, even though the truth is only to be found in the back pages, and their outstanding op-ed columnists, namely, Frank Rich, Paul Krugman, Bob Herbert, and Maureen Dowd.

When and IF EVER the truth comes out about the Bush administrations, reaching back to Reagan and the C.I.A. it will be a hair-raising story about how close the U.S. have come to becoming a fascist state.

[McCamy Taylor]

24. The 2 Torture Tapes story was timed to discredit the CIA after Iran NIE was released. It was WH

propaganda which claimed that only the CIA was involved and that WH involvement was limited to Harriet Miers telling the CIA "Don't do that"--and that was only added on day two to capture the attention of Democrats.

Now that the NYT realizes that it has been used like a two dollar you know what, it is trying to salvage its reputation and get a Pulitzer Prize---however the newspaper that has been beating the drum to war with Iran with reporters like Michael Gordon has still been in no hurry to bring to Iran NIE back to the forefront of the news, and it still ran an editorial a few days after Mazzetti broke the Two Torture Tapes story in which it said that the Iran NIE should be taken with a grain a salt because any agency that would obstruct justice would also put out a phony NIE.

Do not make a hero out of the NYT. They are a media conglomerate too.

[leveymg]

34. If so, that one "blewback" also. 4 White House lawyers involved in

conspiring with the CIA to do away with the tapes.

Strange way to run a Railroad.

[rodeodance]

15. Cheney vastly Impeded Phase II (with the help of Sen. Roberts)--!!

[ooglymoogly]

16. anyone want to take bets that

the destroyed tapes were the smoking gun.

[go west young man]

18. This portion of the article explains everything.

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.



Obviously these tapes were destroyed for reasons other than harsh interrogation techniques. What those suspects said is the real reason the tapes were destroyed. Who would seriously trust our government in anything after all this shit?

[grahamhgreen]

21. I like Thom Hartmann's take -

1) The tapes showed the victims admitting to obviously impossible acts under torture.

2) This would show that torture does NOT work.

3) The purpose of 'legalizing' torture is to terrorize the U.S. populace, and keep us in place.

[ooglymoogly]

32. I believe it is far more sinister.

As they have destroyed the tapes we have no choice but to assume the very worst.

[Bitwit1234]

17. But he lawyer for the white house

says that he saw the tapes and there was no torture. Now what I want to know, is, congress does not have a high enough "classified" security clearance and a lawyer does...who the hell is this lawyer does anybody know.

[debbierlus]

19. I was wondering what bombshell would be released right before the holidays

It is a biggee....

What the hell are they hiding?

REINVESTIGATE 9/11

NOW.

[debbierlus]

20. They didn't ask SPECIFICALLY for video-tapes...tapes they didn't know existed

Only documents, reports, & information....

According to the linked story....

So, testimony directly from the torture tapes isn't 'information'....Excuse, but isn't there SOLE purpose of
their sick torture to obtain information to protect Americans (I know it isn't, but that is their twisted
rationale)....

They withheld the tapes because the committee didn't ask for them because the committee didn't know they existed.

This is so sick, so twisted, so mind boggling. Right up there with the FAA tapes being ripped apart & disposed in
garbage baskets.

Un-fucking-believable.

[Broadslidin]

23. Any bets, Dick 'n George possess a nearly worn out Edited Copy containing "The Best Of"...!

Surely,
Once a Ghoul, always a Ghoul.

[EVDebs]

25. Leveymg's DU thread bears re-reading ... why the erasure happened

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=389&topic_id=2439700

(from archive in General Discussion, moderators take note, so as not to shunt into 'the dungeon').

A NEW 9-11 Commission re-examination with ALL the evidence is required this time around. No more errors and omissions.

[McCamy Taylor]

26. As usual, what Mazzetti leaves out is the best part. Kean's ties to United Health and Path to 9/11

make anything that he does and says suspect.

Tom Kean Sr. is infamous for vetting The Path to 9/11 which ruthlessly slandered the Bill Clinton administration right before the 2006 elections.

http://www.bluejersey.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2401

One scene that reporters went back to again and again on the call is the one that depicts a completely fictional account of Sandy Berger supposedly telling CIA operatives on the ground in Afghanistan, with Osama bin Laden practically in their cross-hairs, that they can’t go ahead and take him out. As you all know: Never happened. Jessie McKinley of the New York Times asked Kean, "If it’s not supported by the Commission’s findings, how exactly did it make it into the movie…Did this raise any red flags for you?"

The same source asked how much Kean was paid for signing off on that piece of propaganda.

I think I know how he was paid. He was paid by not having his ass hauled off to jail.

Here is what Kean does for a living now. He sits around at United Healthcare and draws a big salary. Here is a story Salon did around the time of the Path to 9/11 debacle about United Healthcare's backdated bonus scandal and its problems with the SEC.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/09/15/kean/

For the past several months, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating the conduct of United Health's management and directors. So have the Internal Revenue Service and prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, who have subpoenaed documents from the company. The investigations came to light after a series of probing stories in the Wall Street Journal last May, which exposed the apparent backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock options by United Health management.


Those alleged manipulations, inflating the value of options granted to the company's management, evidently occurred with the connivance of the directors, including Kean, who sat on the company's compensation committee during three crucial years, according to the Journal.

snip

Was Kean gullible, irresponsible, stupid or negligent? Perhaps we will learn when he is put under oath. As financial journalist Andy Serwer said on CNN when the Journal story broke, "These guys just sort of look crooked." Kean never seems to have noticed, and it is worth mentioning that his own compensation as a United Health director in 2004 reached $650,000 -- much higher than average for corporate directors, especially since he missed nearly a quarter of that year's meetings.

Kean doesn't quite seem to comprehend how badly he has compromised himself at United Health, since he continues to behave inappropriately. Last month the Journal reported that several top United Health executives and their spouses donated more than $20,000 to Kean Jr.'s Senate campaign at a fundraiser in Minnesota last May -- held on the same day that Kean Sr. and the other company directors met to consider how they would handle the burgeoning backdating scandal. When the Menendez campaign pointed out this gross conflict of interest, a Kean campaign spokeswoman claimed that the nexus of board meeting and fundraiser was only "a coincidence." The Keans' Republican supporters roared with outrage that anyone would dare to question the former governor's honesty and judgment.

So, what is going to happen to all these crooked CEO's?

http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/12/07/ex_unitedhealth_ceo_settles_with_sec/

According to this story written just a couple of weeks ago, it looks like the Bush administration has cut a deal. The United execs will have to give back some of their ill gotten gains, but they do not have to admit any wrong doing and no one is going to jail.

Did Tom Kean Sr. buy a "Get out jail free" card with his vetting of The Path to 9/11 ? And since the case against United Health is not quite closed, will he say whatever the office of Vice President Dick Cheney wants him to say about the CIA? I don't know, but I would take with a grain of salt anything he says. So, when he says "the agency made a conscious decision to impede the 9/11 investigation" I would read that as "someone told Tom Kean to say that the CIA made a conscious decision to impede the 9/11 investigation".

That is problem with telling lies. Once you start, no one can ever trust anything you have to say again. The same goes for journalists who spread other people's propaganda.

[wordpix]

28. is that the smell of evidence burning in the Executive Office Bldg?

[intheflow]

29. K&R

[Diamond Dave]

30. K&R n/t

[humbled_opinion]

31. Is there nothing above the contempt of this WH? n/t

[Octafish]

33. Zelikow is part of the problem.

The guy decided to ignore a lot of stuff that didn't come over, like the Able Danger information.

A big-time historian before his government service, Zelikow is remembered for his transcriptions of key sections of Cuban Missile Crisis tapes from the Kennedy White House.