Lee Hamilton Says the CIA Obstructed the 9/11 Commission

9/11 Commission's Lee Hamilton '52 Reacts to CIA Destruction of Torture Tapes
http://www.depauw.edu/news/index.asp?id=20521

December 8, 2007, Greencastle, Ind. - "Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes," says Lee Hamilton, who co-chaired the 9/11 Commission, in the wake of reports the CIA destroyed videotapes of interrogations of two al-Qaida suspects. "Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge," adds Hamilton, a 1952 graduate of DePauw University, in today's Detroit Free Press.

... Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune reports "the former chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, who said the CIA assured them repeatedly during their inquiry that no original material existed from its interrogations of Qaeda figures, said they were furious to learn about the tapes ... Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton said they had made clear in hours of negotiations and discussions with the CIA, as well as in written requests, that they wanted all material connected to the interrogations of Qaeda operatives in the agency's custody in order to get a complete understanding of the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks for their 2004 report."

Members of the 9/11 Commission...

Always act "mad" when news of something omitted or lied about regarding 9/11 comes out. And then, they move on...


Who Is? Archives

Remember the thing with Bob Woodward's book

Woodward revealed a meeting (Tenet and Black with Rice) not mentioned in the report, 9/11 Commissioners expressed outrage at not being told about it, then it was determined they were, in fact, told about it:

http://www.cooperativeresearch.org/context.jsp?item=a071001tenetwarnsric...

These two:

July 10, 2001: CIA Director Gives Urgent Warning to White House of Imminent, Multiple, Simultaneous Al-Qaeda Attacks, Possibly Within US

September 30-October 3, 2006: 9/11 Commissioners Claim to Be Furious They Were Not Told of July 2001 Warning, When In Fact They Were

I just looked at Without Precedent. The relevant section for access to detainees is on pages 119-123. They talk about trying to get access to the detainees, meaning either direct interrogations by 9/11 C staff members or observing an interrogation through a one-way mirror (again by a staff member). They are annoyed at not having the transcripts, but there is no mention of them asking for video (or transcripts) I can see in Without Precedent.

So either they didn't ask, or they did ask and the CIA lied to them and said it didn't have them. I don't know, who do you trust least: Mr. October Surprise or Langley? Kean and Hamilton say they made written requests. If so, let's see the documents and let's see the CIA's replies. The CIA says it kept the tapes as long as it did partly because the 9/11 C might want access to them, so something bad is definitely up here.

And...

Able Danger.


Who Is? Archives

The "CIA Destruction of Torture Tapes" News Story...

will add to the movement some new converts. Many not trusting the CABAL, the CIA, the Omission Commision,
but not yet accepting the full TRUTH will see the CIA's destruction of evidence and take the next logical step.

Hamilton's feigned indignant response is completely transparent to anyone who has seen the light. If he had a
conscience I would say he feels a little guilty for the cover up.

But since he doesn't I'd say he's trying to cover his own ass.

911 Commision Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton Admits FLAWS

911 Commision Co-Chairman Lee Hamilton Admits FLAWS

C.H.A.N.G.E. confronts Lee Hamilton

Lee Hamilton vs. 9/11 Truthers

and Hamilton moves on to a lucrative appointment?

The 9/11 Commission published its final report on Aug. 21, 2004. Less than a month later, Lee Hamilton receives a lucrative appointment to BAE. A press release is included below taken from the North American BAE Systems website:

09-15-2004

BAE SYSTEMS APPOINTS LEE HAMILTON TO NORTH AMERICA BOARD OF DIRECTORS
ROCKVILLE, Md. -- BAE Systems has appointed Lee H. Hamilton to its North America Board of Directors. In this role, he will provide guidance and expertise on BAE Systems North America's strategic objectives.

BAE is former British Aerospace. Can the appointment be interpreted as a reward for a job well done? Or, is it, Hamilton is being brought on board for his connections and skill with snow jobs? It's a reason you ...

...cannot believe him!

Sincere Lee

Did Lee Hamilton obstruct the inquiry? Yes........why the fake posture here when the whole commission was a scam?

Meanwhile check out the video here on the mysterey plane over the White House on 9/11

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h8mGvFzvwFM

limited hangout

This is what they call a 'limited hangout'--the controversy appears create a division between collaborators diverting public attention from the fact that AQ is a CIA front and that the people they tortured had nothing to do with the insiders who carried out the operation, all friends with the people who did the cover up like Hamilton.

BS !

.....Any moron would have followed up on Mineta's testamony. He's a liar. And not a very good one. He has to know it's all BS, and he did nothing to bring out the truth. So he is a guilty as anyone else turning a blind eye.

Now in the NY Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/08/washington/08inquire.html?th&emc=th

"The C.I.A. certainly knew of our interest in getting all the information we could on the detainees, and they never indicated to us there were any videotapes,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge.”

Congress Looks Into Obstruction as Calls for Justice Inquiry Rise

By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 8, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 7 — The Central Intelligence Agency faced the threat of obstruction-of-justice investigations on Friday from both the Justice Department and Congressional committees over the destruction of videotapes of interrogations of Qaeda operatives.
The Justice Department said it would review calls for a formal inquiry into the destruction of the tapes, while the House and Senate intelligence committees said they were opening investigations of their own into the episode, which Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, chairman of the Senate panel, called “extremely disturbing.”

Dana Perino, the White House spokeswoman, said Friday that President Bush “has no recollection of being made aware of the tapes or their destruction” before this week. She added that the C.I.A. and the White House counsel’s office were reviewing the facts and that they would cooperate with any Justice Department inquiry.

The pressure for a full investigation into the handling of the tapes puts Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey in a difficult position early in his tenure because of the questions that arose at his confirmation hearings in October about his views on harsh C.I.A. interrogation tactics.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other liberal groups on Friday called for the appointment of an outside counsel to examine possible criminal acts by the C.I.A., arguing that the Justice Department had proved unable in the past to adequately investigate claims of prisoner abuse against the administration.

The tapes, which showed severe interrogation methods against two operatives from Al Qaeda, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, were made in 2002 and destroyed in 2005, the C.I.A. acknowledged this week after being questioned about the issue by The New York Times. The agency said the tapes were destroyed in part to protect the identities of the interrogators.

Meanwhile, the former chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, who said the C.I.A. assured them repeatedly during their inquiry that no original material existed from its interrogations of Qaeda figures, said they were furious to learn about the tapes.

The C.I.A. indicated that the Sept. 11 commission never specifically asked for any tape recordings of prisoner interrogations.

But in separate interviews on Friday, the co-chairmen, Thomas H. Kean and Lee H. Hamilton, said they had made clear in hours of negotiations and discussions with the C.I.A., as well as in written requests, that they wanted all material connected to the interrogations of Qaeda operatives in the agency’s custody in order to get a complete understanding of the events leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks for their 2004 report.

The commission ended up getting summaries of interrogation reports and was able to forward questions of its own for C.I.A. officers to ask the prisoners.

“The C.I.A. certainly knew of our interest in getting all the information we could on the detainees, and they never indicated to us there were any videotapes,” Mr. Hamilton said. “Did they obstruct our inquiry? The answer is clearly yes. Whether that amounts to a crime, others will have to judge.”

Mr. Kean said, “I’m upset that they didn’t tell us the truth.”

The existence of material on unidentified Qaeda detainees also became a central issue in the terrorism prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, who sought access to witness statements in an effort to show that he did not have advance knowledge of the Sept. 11 attacks.

The Justice Department, under questioning from the federal judge in the case in 2005, denied that any tape recording of the interrogations existed, only to concede last month that the C.I.A. had found three tapes that are apparently still in existence. It is unclear which Qaeda figures are on those tapes.

Edward B. MacMahon Jr., who represented Mr. Moussaoui during his trial in 2006, said in an interview on Friday that based on the C.I.A.’s acknowledgment that tapes of two Qaeda prisoners were destroyed, “It’s obvious to me that they destroyed material evidence in the case.”

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the C.I.A., said in a statement on Thursday that the tape of Mr. Zubaydah’s interrogation was not relevant to the Moussaoui trial. But Mr. MacMahon said, “General Hayden isn’t a federal judge, and that’s not his decision to make.”

Ms. Perino said President Bush “has complete confidence” in General Hayden and his handling of the issue.

With calls from House and Senate Democrats for a full investigation, the White House seemed to be bracing for an investigation from the Justice Department by initiating an inquiry of its own through the White House counsel’s office. The aim, Ms. Perino said, is to “gather facts.”

The Justice Department said that it was reviewing the requests from Congress for a full investigation. A senior Justice Department official, who spoke about internal deliberations on condition of anonymity, suggested that the department would be likely to wait for a referral from the C.I.A. inspector general.

Key questions in Justice Department or Congressional inquiries are likely to focus on the C.I.A.’s policies on the destruction of classified material; the legal rationale for destroying the tapes; the status of requests pending at the time of the destruction from Mr. Moussaoui’s lawyers, the Sept. 11 commission and other proceedings; and what members of Congress were told about the tapes.

With Democrats seizing on the destruction of the tapes, some leading Republicans appeared to distance themselves from the political fallout. Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the top Republican on the intelligence committee, sent a letter to the C.I.A., along with Representative Silvestre Reyes of Texas, chairman of the panel, saying the agency’s suggestion that the committee was told of the tapes’ destruction “simply is not true.”

Robert Baer

a "former" CIA field officer takes the opportunity to produce a hit piece on 'conspiracy theorists',
while at the same time pretending to want complete and total transparency on 9/11

' The Destroyed Tapes: A Boon for Conspiracy Theorists'

http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/20071207/us_time/thedestroyedtapesaboonforc...

Hamilton's an Establishment shill since before the Iran-Contra

And Baer may still be working for the CIA. Can he really not have read War on Truth or Crossing the Rubicon?

He tosses these tidbits

"Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.

It isn't going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him. One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts. Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There's nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed."

But what of

Stacking The Patsies of 9/11 by Chaim Kupferberg
http://globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP312B.html

Former CIA Member Robert Baer Comments on 9/11 'Inside Job' Possibilities- on Thom Hartmann
http://www.911blogger.com/2006/06/former-cia-member-robert-baer-comments...

The Top 40
http://www.911truth.org/article.php?story=20041221155307646

Inquiry Begins Into Destruction of Tapes

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/washington/09zubaydah.html?_r=1&ref=wa...

Inquiry Begins Into Destruction of Tapes

By MARK MAZZETTI and DAVID JOHNSTON
Published: December 9, 2007

WASHINGTON, Dec. 8 — The Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency’s internal watchdog on Saturday began a joint preliminary inquiry into the spy agency’s destruction of hundreds of hours of videotapes showing interrogations of top operatives of Al Qaeda.

more...

Tommorow Tuesday 12-11-2007 10 am to 1 pm

Hi all,

this is pw Paul

Just to let you know i will be at the Palm Beach County Courthouse (downtown wpb) on the 11th of December

from 10 am to 1 pm.(west side of the court house)

I will have at least 200 911 DVD's to hand out with my sign that

reads "FREE DVD'S THAT PROVE 911 WAS AN INSIDE JOB"

100 of them will be the best of LCFC and 911 MYSTERIES

The other 100 will be ZEITGEIST, TBOT and DRG M & R

peace,pw

ps. this will be my last street action until Jan. 11th 2008

see you all next year

Thomas Kean blames the CIA as well...

“Meantime Friday, the former chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Kean, told WNBC’s Jonathan Dienst that the CIA’s destruction of the videotapes hampered the panel’s investigation into the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.”

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22153173