Judicial watch: "Top Pentagon Leader Ordered Destruction of bin Laden Death Photos"HT: JudicialWatch.
Judicial
Watch Uncovers Email Revealing Top Pentagon Leader Ordered Destruction of bin
Laden Death Photos
(Washington, DC) – Judicial Watch announced today
that on January 31, 2014, it received documents from the
Department of Defense (Pentagon) revealing that within hours of its filing a
May 13, 2011, Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
lawsuit seeking photos of the deceased
Osama bin Laden, U.S. Special Operations Commander, Admiral William McRaven
ordered his subordinates to “destroy” any photos they may have had
“immediately.”
Judicial Watch had filed a FOIA request for the photos 11 days
earlier.
The McRaven email, addressed to
“Gentlemen,” instructs:
One particular item that I want
to emphasize is photos; particularly UBLs remains. At this point – all photos
should have been turned over to the CIA; if you still have them destroy them
immediately or get them to the [redacted].
According to the Pentagon
documents, McRaven sent his email on “Friday, May 13, 2011 5:09 PM.”
The documents do not detail what documents, if any, were destroyed in
response to the McRaven directive. The Judicial Watch
FOIA lawsuit seeking the documents was filed in the United States Court for the
District of Columbia only hours earlier. Judicial Watch also announced
the filing at a morning press conference.
The move by McRaven to
purge the photos appears to have come, at least in part, in response to
aggressive efforts by Judicial Watch to obtain images of the deceased bin Laden
that President Obama, in a rewrite of federal open records law, had refused to
disclose.
“The McRaven ‘destroy them
immediately’ email is a smoking gun, revealing both contempt for the rule of law
and the American’s people right to know,” said Judicial Watch President Tom
Fitton. “The Obama administration has tried to cover this scandal up – and our
lawsuit exposed it. We demand further investigation of the effort
to destroy documents about the bin Laden raid.”Read the full story here.
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