It’s not getting a lot of play in the corporate media here, beyond a few mentions, but it’s page 1 news all over the rest of the world:
Apparently, the CIA destroyed tapes of suspect interrogations. The videotapes showed agency operatives in 2002 subjecting terror suspects — including Abu Zubaydah, the first detainee in CIA custody — to “severe interrogation techniques.” Several CIA officials have said (according to International Herald Tribune accounts) that they were destroyed in part because officers were concerned that tapes documenting controversial interrogation methods could expose agency officials to greater risk of legal jeopardy. The official CIA story is that the recordings were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.
The Senate is planning an investigation, because it appears that the CIA destroyed potential evidence of criminal wrongdoing, and did so specifically to protect agency officials. This is HUGE.
Could be even bigger, though — In the book Why America Slept – The Failure to Prevent 9/11, published in 2003, Gerald Pozner wrote a chapter on the interrogation of Zubaydah. In it, he described the interrogation, with two active intelligence operatives as his sources. The CIA never made any comment on the book.
In the book, he talks about the fact that Zubaydah was fooled in a false-flag operation to believe that the Saudis held him, instead of the US. Instead of being afraid of the ‘Saudis,’ he demanded to talk to three Saudi princes (one, the nephew of the King, who happened to be in the U.S. on 9/11). He gave his interrogators the private cell phone numbers of all three princes, as well as the chief of Pakistan’s air force. Zubaydah, a top al Qaeda operative, said that these Saudi royals, and a top Pakistani military man, were his sponsors.
After the U.S. told the Saudis and Pakistanis of Zubaydah’s finger pointing, all four men had tragic ‘accidents.’
The King’s nephew died of complications from liposuction at the age of 43. A day later, the 41 year old Prince named by Zubaydah died in a one-car accident on his way to the funeral of the King’s nephew. The third named prince, age 25, died a week later of “thirst,” according to the Saudi Royal Court. And shortly after that, the chief of Pakistan’s air force died when his plane exploded with his wife and 15 of his top aides on board.
No shit.
And now the only evidence of that interrogation has been destroyed by the CIA.