The recent revelations of CIA tapes of "aggressive interrogations" being destroyed comes as a surprise, but it really shouldn't. As Glenn Greenwald has pointed out in the past, the Bush administration has a nasty habit of "losing" documents that may be damning. But the problem was never really limited to the Bush administration, as this diary will show. The US has done its share of wrongdoings in the past and it often does the best it can to cover them up.
Associated Press, 18 February 2005:
Pictures of U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan posing with hooded and bound detainees during mock executions were destroyed after the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq to avoid another public outrage, Army documents released Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union show.
New York Times, 7 January 2003:
More than 300,000 American Indians gave a federal judge a detailed court filing today based on private historical records asserting that the government had cheated them out of as much as $137.2 billion over the last 115 years.
[...]
For generations Indians have complained that the federal government has lost or stolen millions of dollars earned on tribal lands. And for decade after decade the government has ignored or disputed those contentions while failing to offer detailed accounts of how much money has been raised from oil and mineral, timber and grazing leases, proceeds of which go into a trust fund for the Indians' benefit.
The conflict -- dating from 1887 -- escalated into a lawsuit that the Indians filed against the Department of the Interior in June 1996. In the six years since, the standoff has become ever more bitter, documents have been destroyed and interior and Treasury secretaries have been held in contempt of court. But until now the Indians' evidence of loss was largely anecdotal.
New York Times, 14 November 2000:
General Pinochet's secret police chief, Gen. Manuel Contreras, was later convicted in Chile of ordering what was, up to that time, the worst act of foreign-sponsored terrorism on American soil: the bombing on Sept. 21, 1976, of the car in which Orlando Letelier, a former confidant of the deposed Chilean president, Salvador Allende, was traveling to his job at a Washington research institute along with two colleagues. He and Ronni K. Moffitt were killed; her husband, Michael Moffitt, survived the blast.
[...]
In 1991, the documents show, the C.I.A. destroyed its file on General Contreras, who had been a paid informant for the agency.
New York Times, 29 May 1997:
The Central Intelligence Agency, which has repeatedly pledged for more than five years to make public the files from its secret mission to overthrow the government of Iran in 1953, said today that it had destroyed or lost almost all the documents decades ago.
Two successive Directors of Central Intelligence, Robert M. Gates in 1992 and R. James Woolsey Jr. in 1993, publicly pledged that the Iran records would be released as part of the C.I.A.'s ''openness'' initiatives. But they did not know there was virtually nothing left to open: almost all of the documents were destroyed in the early 1960's.
''If anything of substantive importance that was an only copy was destroyed at any time,'' Mr. Woolsey said tonight, ''this is a terrible breach of faith with the American people and their ability to understand their own history.
Washington Post, 30 March 1995:
The Clinton administration took a series of steps yesterday to secure any documents or other records relating to a possible U.S. government role in two deaths allegedly ordered by a Guatemalan colonel who was a CIA informer, White House officials said.
The actions came after Rep. Robert G. Torricelli (D-N.J.) informed the White House and the Justice Department of allegations by an anonymous employee of the National Security Agency that the Army and the NSA may have known about the two murders when they occurred, in 1990 and 1992. According to the allegations, the Army may have been involved in the murders and both agencies were trying to conceal their roles by shredding documents.
New York Times, 5 January 1994:
Trying to help the Clinton Administration end the secrecy that surrounded the nation's use of human subjects in radiation experiments, the C.I.A. is searching for files on research it conducted during the cold war involving the use of radiation to alter or control behavior.
But due to secrecy, shredders and the passage of time, little is known about the nature of the tests, their number and the type of radiation involved.
[...]
The Rockefeller Commission report suggested, and Mr. Breckenridge remembers, that documents describing the program may have been destroyed in 1973 by Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the chemical division of the agency's Technical Services staff.
New York Times, 10 June 1990:
While that review goes on, American officials have been criticized for the way they have handled a warehouse full of documents captured in Panama. Frank A. Rubino, General Noriega's chief defense lawyer, said in an interview that it was likely that American intelligence agencies had ''sanitized'' the documents of embarrassing material.
But Justice Department officials say they have been given access to all documents, which are under the control of the United States Army.
But when pressed, officials from the Pentagon, State Department and Justice Department said it was possible some documents were destroyed or removed during the chaotic first days of the invasion. If that happened, it was not intentional, they said.
If anyone has anymore interesting links on the subject, post them in the comments and I'll be sure to add them. I might add more later since Lexis-Nexis is down for me now.