Gavin McNett

The 9/11 Commission may have relied to a great extent on testimony obtained through coercive interrogations, and may have knowingly ordered further rounds of such interrogations, according to reports by NBC News and the Washington Post.

According to Robert Windrem and Victor Limjoco of NBC News’s investigative blog, Deep Background, on Thursday, “The 9/11 Commission suspected that critical information it used in its landmark report was the product of harsh interrogations of al-Qaida operatives - interrogations that many critics have labeled torture.” Yet, according to Windrem and Limjoco, ”Commission staffers never questioned the agency about the interrogation techniques and in fact ordered a second round of interrogations specifically to ask additional questions of the same operatives.”

The NBC reporters say that these conclusions are “the result of an extensive NBC News analysis of the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report and interviews with Commission staffers and current and former U.S. intelligence officials.”

However, a Dec. 23 Washington Post report by Joby Warrick and Dan Eggen establishes that the 9/11 Commission actively requested information on the interrogation techniques used on detainees, and while little is available on what the commission was told, CIA sources claim that the agency fully cooperated with the commission’s requests.

Warrick and Eggen cite a “seven-page report for former [9/11 Commission] members by the panel's former executive director, Philip Zelikow,” which states that the commission “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.”

According to Zelikow’s report, Warrick and Eggen write, “The commission also made specific inquiries about the interrogations of suspected al-Qaeda operatives Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein, commonly known as Abu Zubaida, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the report says.” These suspected Al-Qaeda operatives were the subjects of the CIA interrogation tapes that were erased, to great later fanfare, in 2005.

On the CIA's cooperation with the commission's requests, Warrick and Eggen cite CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield, who states, "The notion that the CIA wasn't cooperating or forthcoming with the 9/11 Commission is just plain wrong. It is utterly without foundation. CIA cooperation and assistance is what enabled the 9/11 Commission to reconstruct the plot in their very comprehensive report." CIA officials claim that the Zubaida and al-Nashiri tapes were not given to the commission because the commission did not specifically ask for them.

A book by New York Times reporter Philip Shenon, due to be published on Feb. 5, claims that Zelikow conducted secret conversations with the White House and Karl Rove during the 9/11 Commission’s tenure, despite the fact that it was chartered as an independent oversight commission.

Originally published on Friday February 1, 2008.