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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? The 9/11 Commission was not
tasked with investigating interrogation methods or detainee
treatment. The commission was tasked with investigating al
Qaeda’s participation in the 9/11 attack and determining the
perpetrators of the terrorist event. There was no reason to
withhold from the commission video evidence of confessions
implicating al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Was the video evidence withheld from the 9/11 Commission because
the alleged participants in the plot did not confess, did not
implicate al Qaeda, and did not implicate bin Laden? Does anyone
seriously believe that evidence of confession would not have
been revealed--evidence that could have foreclosed what has
become a massive industry of 9/11 truth seekers involving large
numbers of highly credible persons?
There is no reason for the Bush administration to fear the
torture issue. The Justice Department’s memos have legalized the
practice, and Congress has passed legislation, signed by
President Bush, giving retroactive protection to US
interrogators who tortured detainees. The Military Commissions
Act passed in September 2006 and signed by Bush in October 2006
strips detainees of protections provided by the Geneva
Conventions: “No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial
by military commission under this chapter may invoke the Geneva
Conventions as a source of rights.” Other provisions of the act
strip detainees of speedy trials and of protection against
torture and self-incrimination. The law has a provision that
retroactively protects torturers against prosecution for war
crimes.
Did the Bush administration cleverly take advantage of the
torture claims in order to spin the destruction of the CIA video
tapes as a “torture story.” It is much more likely that the
tapes were destroyed because they reveal the absence of
confession to the plot. As Kean and Hamilton ask, without
evidence how do we know the truth? All we have is the word of
the administration that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons of
mass destruction and that, while sitting on a NIE report that
concluded that Iran had terminated its weapons program in 2003,
told us that Iran had an ongoing nuclear weapons program and was
close to having a nuclear weapon.
What about the bin Laden video tape in which he takes credit for
the 9/11 attack? Every indication is that the tape is a fake.
The bin Laden in the Nov. 9, 2001, “confession video” looks
nothing like the bin Laden in the last confirmed video of
December, 2001.
Recently,the Italian newspaper, Corriere Della Sera, reported
that the former president of Italy, Francesco Cossiga, said that
Italian intelligence had concluded that the bin Laden confession
video was a fake.
William Arkin in the online Washington Post, Feb. 1, 1999,
described a voice-morphing technology developed at the
government’s Los Alamos laboratory. Arkin reported that digital
morphing, including appearance, “has come of age, available for
use in psychological operations.”
Investigative reporter Kristina Borjesson reminds us that “six
days after 9/11, CNN reported that bin Laden had sent a
statement to Al Jazeera denying that he had been involved.” She
also reminds us that the FBI says it has no hard evidence that
bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. The FBI wants Osama for the
1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, not for
9/11. Borjesson also reports that in the “confession video” bin
Laden is revealed writing with his right hand, but is known to
be left-handed. [
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1489
]
If the bin Laden “confession video” is indeed a fake, as it
appears to be, why run the risk of creating such a video if the
CIA has on video tape the confessions of the alleged al Qaeda
participants in the 9/11 plot? Why destroy such evidence,
especially when torture has been given a green light by the DOJ
and US Congress?
Dr. Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the
Reagan administration. He is a former university professor and
associate editor of the Wall Street Journal.
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