9/11 Commission: White House and CIA Obstructed Investigation
Via Make Them Accountable comes the following news: the chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission say that those who knew that the CIA had destroyed interrogation tapes have “obstructed our investigation.”
For the New York Times Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton write:
There could have been absolutely no doubt in the mind of anyone at the C.I.A. — or the White House — of the commission’s interest in any and all information related to Qaeda detainees involved in the 9/11 plot. Yet no one in the administration ever told the commission of the existence of videotapes of detainee interrogations.
When the press reported that, in 2002 and maybe at other times, the C.I.A. had recorded hundreds of hours of interrogations of at least two Qaeda detainees, we went back to check our records. We found that we did ask, repeatedly, for the kind of information that would have been contained in such videotapes…
As a legal matter, it is not up to us to examine the C.I.A.’s failure to disclose the existence of these tapes. That is for others. 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 the greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.
As Glenn Greenwald writes for Salon, “[i]t’s hard to imagine a more serious scandal than this.” It seems that the White House not only knew about the tapes -and that they were (going to be) destroyed – but that some Bush administration officials even participated in meetings on the matter. Glenn argues that the “top White House officials” involved “vigorously argued that these videos should be destroyed.”
This should indeed be a major controversy. As Glenn writes:
In light of this Op-Ed, do Mitt Romney, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and Mike Huckabee think the White House should publicly disclose to the country the role Bush and Cheney played in the destruction of this evidence? If there are any reporters left who aren’t traipsing around together in Iowa, it seems pretty clear that this story ought to be dominating the news.
Although we often talk about policies, it seems to me that Glenn is quite right to point out that journalists should ask the candidates about this matter. And if journalists don’t do it, bloggers should (in blogger’s conference calls). As it is, I’ve sent out e-mails to various Republican campaigns, asking them for a response. We’ll see what they have to say.
