9/11 staff says CIA withheld videotapes

WASHINGTON — Former members and employees of the Sept. 11 commission have concluded the CIA withheld videotapes of harsh interrogations even after specific and "very detailed" requests about the two prisoners whose tapes were later destroyed, a report says.

The seven-page report for former commission members by the panel's former executive director, Philip Zelikow, said the group made broad initial requests for intelligence information from interrogations, "including repeated requests for very detailed information" about the interrogations and how they were carried out.

The commission also made specific inquiries about the interrogations of suspected al-Qaida operatives Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the report said. The CIA revealed earlier this month that tapes of those prisoners' interrogations were destroyed in 2005.

"None of the officials involved in these exchanges disclosed the existence of recordings that might have contained facts material to the commission's questions on these points," according to the report, disclosed Saturday by The New York Times.

The Dec. 13 memo essentially confirms earlier complaints that by withholding and then destroying the tapes, the CIA had not complied with the panel's requests for a broad array of documents and other material about CIA detainees.

At the same time, the memo indicates the commission did not specifically ask for videotapes, in part because investigators had only "a vague understanding of what to seek" and ran into frequent roadblocks with the agency. CIA officials have said the tapes were not provided because the commission did not specifically ask for them.

Agency officials rejected the memo's conclusions Saturday, saying the agency cooperated fully with an inquiry that was focused on terrorist plots rather than interrogation techniques.

"The notion that the CIA wasn't cooperating or forthcoming with the 9/11 commission is just plain wrong," agency spokesman Mark Mansfield said. "CIA cooperation and assistance is what enabled the 9/11 commission to reconstruct the plot in their very comprehensive report."

Privately, the CIA reaction ranged from surprise to disappointment. It is misleading, one senior intelligence official said, for commission members to suggest now that interrogation techniques were part of the panel's mandate.

"If the commission had wanted to make an issue of how the information was obtained from the detainees — as opposed to what was learned from them — they had an opportunity to do so at the time. They didn't do that," the official said.

Reached by phone Saturday, Zelikow said the memo "speaks for itself."

The report said that "further investigation is needed to determine whether these nondisclosures violated federal law."