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I am not sure Mukasey had any choice, Emily. The op-ed in today’s New York Times by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton, the co-chairmen of the Sept. 11 commission, was a clarion call for just such an investigation. Here you have the bipartisan pronouncement that, in no uncertain terms, both the CIA and the White House obstructed the commission’s work and lied about it: “[G]overnment officials decided not to inform a lawfully constituted body, created by Congress and the president, to investigate one the [sic] greatest tragedies to confront this country. We call that obstruction.”
Unlike so many of the other Bush-related scandals that have seemed to just dry up or blow over, the destruction of the torture tapes looks more and more like a serious criminal act. If the White House and the CIA deliberately lied to and concealed evidence from the Sept. 11 commission, as well as various trial courts, John Durham, tasked with heading up this investigation, will be looking at very serious charges.
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Reading the story about the CIA's destruction of interrogation tapes that Dahlia points to, I couldn't help being struck by an eerie parallel. This story is unfolding a couple of days after the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the latest case about whether the Guantanamo Bay detainees have any right at all to get to federal court. Days after an earlier go-round about Guantanamo at the high court, in 2004, the Abu Ghraib story broke. The timing raised eyebrows because at oral argument, Paul Clement (now solicitor general) had answered "no" to a question from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg about whether the government ever engages in torture.
There was no moment like that at argument this week, and the timing of the CIA story seems driven by the New York Times, which says that it told the CIA Wednesday that it was about to report on the tapes' destruction. And yet the parallel is there: This week, the government assured the court that the detainees had more rights than anyone in their situation before. Never mind that we're destroying the evidence of how we've treated them. Just don't look behind the curtain.
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