Last night on his radio show, using the New York Times report about the destruction of detainee interrogation tapes and the 9/11 Commission Report as aides, Mark Levin disassembled the purported scandal:
From yesterday’s New York Times:
Staff members of the Sept. 11 commission, which completed its work in 2004, expressed surprise when they were told that interrogation videotapes had existed until 2005.
“The commission did formally request material of this kind from all relevant agencies, and the commission was assured that we had received all the material responsive to our request,” said Philip D. Zelikow, who served as executive director of the Sept. 11 commission and later as a senior counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
“No tapes were acknowledged or turned over, nor was the commission provided with any transcript prepared from recordings,” [emphasis added mine] he said.
Then why, Mr. Zelikow, in the ‘notes’ section (footnotes endnotes) of the 9/11 Commission Report are the following sources sited? (The endnote number begins each entry. At the end of that entry is a link directly to the related page in the Commission’s report):
Endnotes for Chapter 2:
#18. … See, e.g., Intelligence report, interrogation of Zubaydah, Oct. 29, 2002;… [Page 54] #76. …. Intelligence reports, interrogations of KSM and Zubaydah, 2003… [page 66]
Endnotes for Chapter 5
#19. … See also Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Nov. 7, 2002; … [page 150] #31. … See Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Aug. 29, 2002. … [page 153] #35 … Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, May 16, 2003… [page 154]
Endnotes for Chapter 6
#5 … See Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, July 10, 2002… [page 175] #8 … For more on the origins of the Encyclopedia, see Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, June 24, 2003 … [also page 175] #125 … see Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Dec. 13, 2003… [page 191]
Endnotes for Chapter 7
#90 … Intelligence report, interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, Feb. 19, 2004;… [page 232] #108 … Intelligence report, interrogation of Zubaydah, Feb. 18, 2004… [page 236]
The information relating to 9/11 from Abu Zubaydah (from his interrogations) was provided to the 9/11 Commission and used within their report. It seems as if Mr. Zelikow was playing word games when he said the CIA provided them no transcript of those interrogations. He had the information the Commission requested and they were not investigating interrogation techniques.
Again, from the Times:
The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terror suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 commission, which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and any other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
In both 2003 and 2005 C.I.A. lawyers told prosecutors in the Moussaoui case that the C.I.A. did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge. Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers had hoped that records of the interrogations might provide exculpatory evidence for Mr. Moussaoui, showing that the Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui and clearing him of involvement in the Sept. 11, 2001, plot.
…a C.I.A. spokesman said that the court had sought tapes of “specific, named terrorists whose comments might have a bearing on the Moussaoui case” and that the videotapes destroyed were not of those individuals. Intelligence officials identified Abu Zubaydah as one of the detainees whose interrogation tape was destroyed, but the other detainee’s name was not disclosed.
In other words, the information gathered from the interrogations on the tapes was neither relevant to the Moussaoui trial nor within the specifications of the federal judge’s request.
By the way, it took me all of 10 minutes, using the ‘find’ command, to gather the footnote information from the 9/11 Commission Report. Perhaps someone at the Times will one day actually read the whole thing.
Note: This is a cross-post from last night at MarkLevinFan.com