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Stonewalled by the CIA
By Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton
The New York Times
Wednesday 02 January 2008
More than five years ago, Congress and President Bush created the 9/11 commission.
The goal was to provide the American people with the fullest possible account
of the "facts and circumstances relating to the terrorist attacks of Sept.
11, 2001" - and to offer recommendations to prevent future attacks.
Soon after its creation, the president's chief of staff directed all executive
branch agencies to cooperate with the commission.
The commission's mandate was sweeping and it explicitly included the
intelligence agencies. But the recent revelations that the C.I.A. destroyed
videotaped interrogations of Qaeda operatives leads us to conclude that the
agency failed to respond to our lawful requests for information about the 9/11
plot. Those who knew about those videotapes - and did not tell us about
them - obstructed our investigation.
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.
The commission did not have a mandate to investigate how detainees were treated;
our role was to investigate the history and evolution of Al Qaeda and the 9/11
plot. Beginning in June 2003, we requested all reports of intelligence information
on these broad topics that had been gleaned from the interrogations of 118 named
individuals, including both Abu Zubaydah and Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri, two senior
Qaeda operatives, portions of whose interrogations were apparently recorded
and then destroyed.
The C.I.A. gave us many reports summarizing information gained in the interrogations.
But the reports raised almost as many questions as they answered. Agency officials
assured us that, if we posed specific questions, they would do all they could
to answer them.
So, in October 2003, we sent another wave of questions to the C.I.A.'s
general counsel. One set posed dozens of specific questions about the reports,
including those about Abu Zubaydah. A second set, even more important in our
view, asked for details about the translation process in the interrogations;
the background of the interrogators; the way the interrogators handled inconsistencies
in the detainees' stories; the particular questions that had been asked
to elicit reported information; the way interrogators had followed up on certain
lines of questioning; the context of the interrogations so we could assess the
credibility and demeanor of the detainees when they made the reported statements;
and the views or assessments of the interrogators themselves.
The general counsel responded in writing with non-specific replies. The agency
did not disclose that any interrogations had ever been recorded or that it had
held any further relevant information, in any form. Not satisfied with this
response, we decided that we needed to question the detainees directly, including
Abu Zubaydah and a few other key captives.
In a lunch meeting on Dec. 23, 2003, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, told
us point blank that we would have no such access. During the meeting, we emphasized
to him that the C.I.A. should provide any documents responsive to our requests,
even if the commission had not specifically asked for them. Mr. Tenet replied
by alluding to several documents he thought would be helpful to us, but neither
he, nor anyone else in the meeting, mentioned videotapes.
A meeting on Jan. 21, 2004, with Mr. Tenet, the White House counsel, the secretary
of defense and a representative from the Justice Department also resulted in
the denial of commission access to the detainees. Once again, videotapes were
not mentioned.
As a result of this January meeting, the C.I.A. agreed to pose some of our
questions to detainees and report back to us. The commission concluded this
was all the administration could give us. But the commission never felt that
its earlier questions had been satisfactorily answered. So the public would
be aware of our concerns, we highlighted our caveats on page 146 in the commission
report.
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.
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Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton served as chairman and vice chairman,
respectively, of the 9/11 commission.
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