The Talking Dog

December 19, 2007, Contempt of Court Congress EVERYTHING

The peripatetic Bruce the Veep sends this Grey Lady article which surprises us not, in its revelations that key White House officials were intimately involved in the decision to destroy CIA tapes of the torture interrogations of "high value prisoners" Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. This all matters, of course, because a law suit on behalf of GTMO detainees is moving forward in a Washington courtroom, wherein it is contended that the basis for holding said detainees is that someone screamed out their names during torture.

Let's look at our White House participants in the cover-up decision to destroy the tapes:

Those who took part, the officials said, included Alberto R. Gonzales, who served as White House counsel until early 2005; David S. Addington, who was the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney and is now his chief of staff; John B. Bellinger III, who until January 2005 was the senior lawyer at the National Security Council; and Harriet E. Miers, who succeeded Mr. Gonzales as White House counsel.

Never heard of any of them.

One former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said there had been “vigorous sentiment” among some top White House officials to destroy the tapes. The former official did not specify which White House officials took this position, but he said that some believed in 2005 that any disclosure of the tapes could have been particularly damaging after revelations a year earlier of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Ths Bush White House? That's hard to believe.

The destruction of the tapes is being investigated by the Justice Department, and the officials would not agree to be quoted by name while that inquiry is under way.

I have no doubt that Attorney General Mukasey will get to the bottom of all of this.

Until their destruction, the tapes were stored in a safe in the C.I.A. station in the country where the interrogations took place, current and former officials said. According to one former senior intelligence official, the tapes were never sent back to C.I.A. headquarters, despite what the official described as concern about keeping such highly classified material overseas.

That's probably Thailand, but who knows?

Top officials of the C.I.A’s clandestine service had pressed repeatedly beginning in 2003 for the tapes’ destruction, out of concern that they could leak and put operatives in both legal and physical jeopardy.

Notice which kind of jeopardy was mentioned first.

The only White House official previously reported to have taken part in the discussions was Ms. Miers, who served as a deputy chief of staff to President Bush until early 2005, when she took over as White House counsel. While one official had said previously that Ms. Miers’s involvement began in 2003, other current and former officials said they did not believe she joined the discussions until 2005.

Besides the Justice Department inquiry, the Congressional intelligence committees have begun investigations into the destruction of the tapes, and are looking into the role that officials at the White House and Justice Department might have played in discussions about them. The C.I.A. never provided the tapes to federal prosecutors or to the Sept. 11 commission, and some lawmakers have suggested that their destruction may have amounted to obstruction of justice.

To coin a phrase... ya' think?

This has been... Contempt of Court Congress EVERYTHING


Comments

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Posted by toronto dog training at December 20, 2007 3:09 PM