The New York Times story, "CIA Destroyed 2 Tapes Showing Interrogations" is an incredibly big deal. This is criminal activity of the highest order. As far as I'm concerned, Bush is the instigator of mass murder simply in terms of the killings of Iraqi civilians ("collateral damage"). Now we have further evidence, courtesy of the New York Times, that our government secretly destroyed proof of horrifying criminal activity done in the name of the United States. In fact, if it weren't for the Times, I venture to say no one would have found out that the CIA obviously considered their "enhanced interrogations" illegal, i.e. torture and then destroyed the tapes despite the 9/11 Commission and prosecutors requesting them.
As the Times put it:
The recordings were not provided to a federal court hearing the case of the terrorism suspect Zacarias Moussaoui or to the Sept. 11 Commission, which was appointed by President Bush and Congress, and which had made formal requests to the C.I.A. for transcripts and other documentary evidence taken from interrogations of agency prisoners.
In his statement, General Hayden [the C.I.A. Director] said leaders of Congressional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision to destroy them. But the two top members of the House Intelligence Committee in 2005 said Thursday that they had not been notified in advance of the decision to destroy the tapes.
A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who was the committee's chairman between 2004 and 2006, said the Mr. Hoekstra was "never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed."
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 fo rMr. Moussaoui, showing that the Qaeda detainees did not know Mr. Moussaoui an dclearning him of involvement in the September 11, 2001, plot.
To put this in context of premeditated criminal conspiracy, Daniel Marcus, a law professor at American University who served as general counsel for the Sept. 11 commission and was involved in the discussions about interviews with Qaeda leaders, said he had heard nothing about any tapes behing destroyed.
If tapes were destroyed, he said, "it's a big deal, it's a very big deal," because it could amount to obstruction of justice to withhold evidence being sought in criminal or fact-finding investigations."
AM/NY, a free paper hawked all over New York City, had the AP wire story on the destroyed C.I.A. tapes on page 8, "Fearing leak, CIA destroyed terror tapes in '05". By omission, The AP completely distorted the gist of what the CIA did, implying that Hayden et al were driven to destroy the tapes "out of fear they would leak to the public and compromise the identities of U.S. questioners."
CIA Director Michael Hayden said House and Senate intelligence committee leaders were informed of the existence of the tapes and the CIA's intention to destroy them. He also said the CIA's internal watchdog watched the tapes in 2003 and verified that the interrogation practices were legal.
The AP story doesn't quote anyone other than Hayden thereby leaving the impression that the C.I.A. was merely protecting American operatives fighting the good fight against the "War on Terror".
This sort of media bias to me also rises to the level of accomplice in the conspiracy. Throw the RICO statute at all of them. Take all the "enemy combatants" out of Guantanamo and shove the entire Bush administration into those Cuban cells.