Why Were The Tapes Destroyed? By Paul Craig Roberts

Why Were The Tapes Destroyed?
By Paul Craig Roberts

04/02/08 "ICH" -- Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was commission member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the 9/11 Commission, telling the Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): “This investigation is now compromised.” Even former FBI director Louis Freeh wrote in the Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there are inaccuracies in the commission’s report and “questions that need answers.”

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly, once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission, and again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered--or mis-answered--questions.

On the second day of this new year, Kean and Hamilton accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation: “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 of the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.”

In their book, Kean and Hamilton wrote that they were unable to obtain “access to star witnesses in custody who were the only possible source for inside information about the 9/11 plot.”

The only information the commission was permitted to have about what was learned from interrogations of alleged plot ringleaders, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, came from “thirdhand” sources. The commission was not permitted to question the alleged plotters in custody or even to meet with those who interrogated the alleged plotters. Consequently, write Kean and Hamilton, “We had no way of evaluating the credibility of detainee information” that was fed to them by third party hands. “How could we tell if someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling us the truth?”

The fact that video tapes of the interrogations existed was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission.

The video tapes have since been destroyed. The destruction of the videos has become an issue because of White House involvement in the decision to destroy the tapes and because the videos are believed to have been destroyed because they reveal methods of torture that the Bush administration denies using.

According to President Bush, the US does not practice torture even though he and his Department of Justice (sic) assert the right to torture.

Is the torture issue a red herring?

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article19277.htm

"Is the torture issue a red herring?" If it can be used as one, no doubt it is.

If the current fallback excuse is 'The tapes were destroyed because they evidence torture' I am, of course, wondering 'What worse crimes and who is implicated in these crimes' is on those tapes?

Is Bush implicated directly? Were the tapes made because of a live feed to Bush? to whom?

Where was Bush? Where was Cheney? Where were the DCIA and SecDef? What is the time stamp? Where are the e-mails for that time? Schedules?

Investigators, even the 9/11 Commission, need to step back and start over, it seems, and rethink from within an illegal Junta paradigm.
Any assumptions that the Administration has adhered to law should have been removed by now.

Excellent approach. How would people who know they've already committed the most serious crimes of state direct an interrogation?

A gigantic whitewash.

and nobody does this stuff better than the U.S. government.

may the truth come out (hoping it is in my lifetime)

...and they do not want to be held accountable for their heinous behavior.

The BushCo republicon homelanders shame themselves and the United States of America with their amoral, anti-Christian torture values and practices.