The U.S. military said yesterday that it can't locate its copy of the video obtained from a whistleblower and released by WikiLeaks on Monday. In a follow-up interview with Greg Sargent, a Centcom spokesman said the footage "may no longer be retrievable."
Centcom spokesman Bill Speaks went into some detail about the footage in a telephone interview just now. He said that Central Command doesn’t have the video because it “does not have a repository for that type of footage” and that this type of footage — Apache gun camera footage — is not sent to Central Command. He also confirmed that it’s not kept in an official capacity by U.S. forces in Iraq, either.
“There are literally hundreds of thousands of hours of this type of footage,” Speaks said.
Speaks said that at present, Centcom has only confirmed that this type of footage is kept by the units themselves, if it is kept at all.
Pressed on whether this meant the military’s own footage might never be recovered, Speaks said: “I’m not in a position to rule that out.”
Speaks did confirm for the first time on the record, however, that Centcom believes the footage that Wikileaks footage is genuine. “We don’t see any reason to doubt its authenticity,” he said.
It's important to note that the military is not questioning the veracity of the footage, which was obtained from a military whistleblower. They would, however, need to compare the images and audio from this video with their own in order to confirm it publicly. This doesn't seem to be the equivalent of the CIA specifically destroying tapes of torture sessions. The military is being forthcoming, now that the story is out, with releasing what information they say they have. The loss of this video, however, could be a convenient way of making the story go away. If they don't have an "official" copy of the video, they can't really move forward on further investigation.