Why Were The 9/11 Tapes Destroyed?

Many Americans are content with the 9/11 Commission
Report, but the two chairmen of the commission, Thomas
Kean and Lee Hamilton are not. Neither was Commission
member Max Cleland, a US Senator who resigned from the
9/11 Commission, telling the

Boston Globe (November 13, 2003): "This
investigation is now compromised." Even former FBI
director Louis Freeh wrote in the

Wall Street Journal (Nov. 17, 2005) that there
are inaccuracies in the commission`s report and
"questions that need answers."

Both Kean and Hamilton have twice stated publicly,
once in their 2006 book, Without Precedent: The Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission,
and
again in the January 2, 2008, New York Times, that there
are inaccuracies in their report and unanswered–or mis-answered–questions.

On the second day of this New Year, Kean and Hamilton
accused the CIA of obstructing their investigation:
"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 of the
greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call
that obstruction."

In their book, Kean and Hamilton wrote that they were
unable to obtain "access to star witnesses in custody
who were the only possible source for inside information
about the 9/11 plot." 

The only information the commission was permitted to
have about what was learned from interrogations of
alleged plot ringleaders, such as Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed, came from "third hand" sources. The
commission was not permitted to question the alleged
plotters in custody or even to meet with those who
interrogated the alleged plotters. Consequently, write
Kean and Hamilton, "We had no way of evaluating the
credibility of detainee information" that was fed to
them by third party hands. "How could we tell if
someone such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was telling us
the truth?" 

The fact that video tapes of the interrogations
existed was kept secret from the 9/11 Commission.

The video tapes have since been destroyed. The
destruction of the videos has become an issue because of
White House involvement in the decision to destroy the
tapes and because the videos are believed to have been
destroyed because they reveal methods of torture that
the Bush administration denies using.

According to President Bush, the US does not practice
torture even though he and his Department of Justice (sic)
assert the right to torture.

Is the torture issue a red herring? The 9/11
Commission was not tasked with investigating
interrogation methods or detainee treatment. The
commission was tasked with investigating al Qaeda`s
participation in the 9/11 attack and determining the
perpetuators of the terrorist event. There was no reason
to withhold from the commission video evidence of
confessions implicating al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.

Was the video evidence withheld from the 9/11
Commission because the alleged participants in the plot
did not confess, did not implicate al Qaeda, and did not
implicate bin Laden? Does anyone seriously believe that
evidence of confession would not have been
revealed–evidence that could have foreclosed what has
become a massive industry of 9/11 truth seekers
involving large numbers of highly credible persons?

There is no reason for the Bush administration to
fear the torture issue. The Justice Department`s memos
have legalized the practice, and Congress has passed
legislation, signed by President Bush, giving
retroactive protection to US interrogators who tortured
detainees. The Military Commissions Act passed in
September 2006 and signed by Bush in October 2006 strips
detainees of protections provided by the Geneva
Conventions:

"No alien unlawful enemy combatant subject to trial by
military commission under this chapter may invoke the
Geneva Conventions as a source of rights." Other
provisions of the act strip detainees of speedy trials
and of protection against torture and
self-incrimination. The law has a provision that
retroactively protects torturers against prosecution for
war crimes.

Did the Bush administration cleverly take advantage
of the torture claims in order to spin the destruction
of the CIA video tapes as a "torture story." It
is much more likely that the tapes were destroyed
because they reveal the absence of confession to the
plot. As Kean and Hamilton ask, without evidence how do
we know the truth? All we have is the word of the
administration that told us Saddam Hussein had weapons
of mass destruction and that, while sitting on a NIE
report that concluded that Iran had terminated its
weapons program in 2003, told us that Iran had an
ongoing nuclear weapons program and was close to having
a nuclear weapon. 

What about the bin Laden video tape in which he takes
credit for the 9/11 attack? Every indication is that the
tape is a fake. The bin Laden in the Nov. 9, 2001,
"confession video" looks nothing like the bin Laden
in the last confirmed video of December, 2001. 

Recently, the Italian newspaper, Corriere Della
Sera, reported that the former president of Italy,
Francesco Cossiga, said that Italian intelligence had
concluded that the bin Laden confession video was a
fake.

William Arkin in the online

Washington Post, Feb. 1,
1999, described a voice-morphing
technology developed at the government`s Los Alamos
laboratory. Arkin reported that digital morphing,
including appearance, "has come of age, available for
use in psychological operations."

Investigative reporter Kristina Borjesson

reminds us that "six days after 9/11, CNN
reported that bin Laden had sent a statement to Al
Jazeera denying that he had been involved." She also
reminds us that the FBI says it has no hard evidence
that bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. The FBI wants
Osama for the 1998 bombings of US embassies in Tanzania
and Kenya, not for 9/11. Borjesson also reports that in
the "confession video" bin Laden is revealed
writing with his right hand, but is known to be
left-handed.

If the bin Laden "confession video" is indeed
a fake, as it appears to be, why run the risk of
creating such a video if the CIA has on video tape the
confessions of the alleged al Qaeda participants in the
9/11 plot?

Why destroy such evidence, especially when torture
has been given a green light by the DOJ and US Congress?

Paul Craig Roberts
[email
him] was Assistant
Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration.
He is the author of

Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider`s Account of
Policymaking in Washington;
 Alienation
and the Soviet Economy and

Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy,
and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of


The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and
Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name
of Justice. Click

here for Peter
Brimelow`s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts
about the recent epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.