The Destroyed Tapes: A Boon for Conspiracy Theorists

[seafan]

The Destroyed Tapes: A Boon for Conspiracy Theorists



The south tower of New York's World Trade Center, left, begins to collapse after a terrorist attack on the buildings as shown in this Sept. 11, 2001, file photo.
Gulnara Samoilova / AP


By ROBERT BAER
Former CIA field officer assigned to the Middle East


December 7, 2007

.....The assumption will be that the CIA did not want the tapes seen in public because they are too graphic and could lead to indictments.

But more to the point, the revelation will raise another question: What other evidence has the CIA destroyed? And can the CIA be trusted to tell us? The CIA had told the 9/11 Commission, when it formally requested such materials, that there was no taping of interrogations. CIA lawyers also told federal prosecutors trying the Zacarias Moussaoui terror case that the agency did not possess recordings of interrogations sought by the judge and Moussaoui's defense lawyers. The CIA insists that the tapes destroyed were not the ones in question.

.....

Still, the people who think 9/11 was an inside job might easily be able to believe that Abu Zubaydah named his American accomplices in the tape that has now been destroyed by the CIA.

It isn't going to help that the Abu Zubaydah investigation has a lot of problems even without destroyed evidence. When Abu Zubaydah was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, two ATM cards were found on him. One was issued by a bank in Saudi Arabia (a bank close to the Saudi royal family) and the other to a bank in Kuwait. As I understand it, neither Kuwait nor Saudi Arabia has been able to tell us who fed the accounts. Also, apparently, when Abu Zubaydah was captured, telephone records, including calls to the United States, were found in the house he was living in. The calls stopped on September 10, and resumed on September 16. There's nothing in the 9/11 Commission report about any of this, and I have no idea whether the leads were run down, the evidence lost or destroyed.

If this sounds like paranoia, it is. But the CIA certainly is not helping by destroying evidence. And they should know better than to destroy evidence in the biggest criminal case in American history. More than anything what we need right now is complete and total transparency on 9/11.

Senator Bob Graham exposed this conspiracy in 2004, and it ain't any *theory*. Not when this man is on the trail of the truth.



http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/001265.php">Senator Bob Graham -- Bush Covered Up Saudi Involvement in 9/11, originally from Salon:






September 8, 2004

.....

Salon spoke with (Graham, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks) by telephone on Tuesday,...


Your investigation in Congress focused on a Saudi national named Omar al-Bayoumi, who had provided extensive assistance to two of the 9/11 hijackers, Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi, when they lived in San Diego. You say al-Bayoumi was apparently a covert agent of the Saudi government, and from that you conclude there was official Saudi support for the plot. Yet the independent 9/11 commission came to a different conclusion. Its executive director, Philip Zelikow, has said his investigation had more access to information than yours - including the opportunity to interview al-Bayoumi. And the commission concluded he had nothing to do with the attacks, that his contacts with the hijackers were coincidental.

Let me say that what we know about this comes primarily from FBI and CIA reports that were in the file in San Diego. And in those files, FBI agents referred to Bayoumi as being a Saudi Arabian agent or Saudi Arabian spy. In the summer of 2002, a CIA agent filed a report that said it was "incontrovertible" that terrorists were receiving assistance, financial and otherwise, from Saudis in San Diego. No. 2: Bayoumi was supposed to be working for a firm that was a subcontractor for the Saudi civil aviation authority. Yet he never showed up for work. His boss tried to fire him, and he received a letter from the Saudi civil aviation authority demanding that he be retained on their payroll despite the fact he wasn't performing any services. And the subcontracting company that employed Bayoumi was owned by a Saudi national who, according to documents seized in Bosnia, was an early financial backer of al-Qaida. Now, that's rather suspicious.

Also suspicious is the number of telephone conversations between Bayoumi and Saudi government representatives. It was a very substantial number that remains classified.

.....

Why do you think the White House is so intent on keeping that information from the public?

I think there are several possible reasons. One is that it did not want the public to be aware of the degree of Saudi involvement in supporting the 9/11 terrorists. Second, it was embarrassing that that support took place literally under the nose of the FBI, to the point where one of the terrorists in San Diego was living at the house of a paid FBI informant. Third, there has been a long-term special relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia, and that relationship has probably reached a new high under the George W. Bush administration, in part because of the long and close family relationship that the Bushes have had with the Saudi royal family.

In the book, you describe being furious with the FBI for blocking your committee's attempts to interview that paid FBI informant. You write that the panel needed the bureau to deliver a congressional subpoena to the informant because he was in the FBI's protective custody and could not be located without the bureau's cooperation. But the FBI refused to help. What happened? And what do you think the bureau was trying to hide?

We had just finished a hearing and had asked various representatives of the FBI to come into a conference room and discuss our strong interest in being able to interview the San Diego informant. It was clear that the FBI representatives were not going to voluntarily allow that to happen, and we had already prepared a subpoena, which I had in my coat pocket. I walked over to the principal representative for the FBI, Ken Wainstein, and I was approaching him with this subpoena, he clasped his hands tightly behind his back. I tried to hand him the subpoena, but he acted as if it were radioactive. Finally he said he didn't want to take the subpoena, but he would get back to us on the following Monday. Well, nobody ever got back to us. It was the only time in my senatorial experience that the FBI has refused to deliver a legally issued congressional subpoena.

Later, the FBI congressional affairs officer sent a letter to Porter Goss and me, saying, "The administration would not sanction a staff interview with the source, nor did the administration agree to allow the FBI to serve a subpoena on the source." What that tells me is the FBI wasn't acting on its own but had been directed by the White House not to cooperate.

.....

It's time to expose the dirty, numbing truth of how and what happened to America on September 11, 2001.

[annabanana]

1. The Coincidence Theorists had better start coming up with a few

better explanations then...

'Cause what they got ain't cutting it.

[libnnc]

2. Word.

:kick:

[Wizard777]

3. I think criminologists is a better term. n/t

[Hydra]

4. I always like how that's a term of contempt

http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/conspiracy

con·spir·a·cy
–noun, plural -cies.
1. the act of conspiring.
2. an evil, unlawful, treacherous, or surreptitious plan formulated in secret by two or more persons; plot.
3. a combination of persons for a secret, unlawful, or evil purpose: He joined the conspiracy to overthrow the government.
4. Law. an agreement by two or more persons to commit a crime, fraud, or other wrongful act.
5. any concurrence in action; combination in bringing about a given result.

So a "conspiracy theory" is basically the idea that one or more people planned something illegal...and you know Bushco did NOTHING ILLEGAL or SECRET during their time of occupation, and if they did, they certainly didn't PLAN it!

"No one could have imagined them taking a plane, slamming it into the Pentagon" -- I'm paraphrasing now -- "into the World Trade Center, using planes as a missile."

Condoleeza Rice

:sarcasm: