1115.org

(1)
We’ve heard Bush’s version of the facts:

My first recollection of whether the tapes existed or whether they were destroyed was when Michael Hayden briefed me.

And Gen. Hayden’s:

General Hayden said leaders of Congressional oversight committees had been fully briefed about the existence of the tapes and told in advance of the decision to destroy them.

And Peter Hoekstra’s:

A spokesman for Representative Peter Hoekstra, Republican of Michigan, who was the committee’s chairman between 2004 and 2006, said that Mr. Hoekstra was “never briefed or advised that these tapes existed, or that they were going to be destroyed.”

And Senate intelligence committee chairman Jay Rockefeller’s:

And, we did not learn until much later, November 2006 — 2 months after the full committee was briefed on the program — that the tapes had in fact been destroyed in 2005.

And Rep. Jane Harman’s:

CIA chief Michael Hayden said Congress was informed the tapes would be destroyed, but Harman disputed that assertion. Former Republican Rep. Porter Goss, not Hayden, led the CIA when the tapes were destroyed two years ago.

“I had no reason to believe that the videotapes would be destroyed without consulting Congress — no reason whatsoever,” she said on NPR.

Harman said she was not informed when the CIA actually did order the tapes’ destruction in late 2005, when Congress, the courts and the Sept. 11 Commission were investigating CIA interrogation practices and requested information from the agency that presumably would have included the destroyed recordings.

Condi’s too:

I was Secretary of State in 2005, indeed, and I can tell you that I myself don’t recollect any knowledge of the tapes.

As you might have noticed, Bush (just like Condi, or you and I) was totally uninvolved at the time, and is still just looking on from the outside, with keen interest.

Hayden made a categorical statement. Everyone else has flatly denied it. And so now we are all dying to know what the true facts are.

Funny thing is that nobody really tells Bush anything at all. He’s just as clueless as you and I about what really happened, and just as interested in finding out the true facts:

“There’s a preliminary inquiry going on and I think you’ll find that a lot more data, facts will be coming out,” he said, “that’s good. It will be interesting to know what the true facts are.”

Time was when the President of the United States could just snap his fingers, and demand to know, right now, what the true facts are. Not any more, I guess.

(2)
There is another set of facts and counter-facts, of course, which has to do with whether Jose A. Rodriguez Jr. destroyed the tapes all on his ownsome (“The full blame for the destruction of the tapes has fallen on Jose Rodriguez, then the CIA’s head of the clandestine division. Rodriguez reportedly undertook the destruction of the tapes in a unilateral manner, without receiving any instructions from his bosses or giving them advance notice of his actions.”), or whether the destruction was approved by some lowly lawyers within the clandestine branch of the CIA (“Lawyers within the clandestine branch of the Central Intelligence Agency gave written approval in advance to the destruction in 2005 of hundreds of hours of videotapes documenting interrogations of two lieutenants from Al Qaeda, according to a former senior intelligence official with direct knowledge of the episode.”), or whether some higher-up kind of person green-lighted it too.

Then there’s the third ring in this circus:

But the videotaping may not have actually stopped in 2002. The New York Times reports today that “a lawyer representing a former prisoner,” Muhammad Bashmilah, “who said he was held by the C.I.A. said the prisoner saw cameras in interrogation rooms after 2002″
[...]
In November, a court filing revealed that “the CIA has three video and audio recordings of interrogations of senior al Qaida captives” that it had previously refused to disclose, but it is unclear when those recordings were made.