UK Foreign Office Reverses Course On CIA Rendition Files

'Lost' To Water Damage: Papers Have Now 'Dried Out'

Jul 18th 2014 - No one's immune from careless document handling, not when a government's in charge! The ongoing war of words over the Internal Revenue Service's lackluster data retention continues, with the agency claiming emails relevant to a House investigation all simply vanished during a series of coincidental computer crashes. That these should have been backed up to hard copy (as IRS policy dictates) and backed up further by servers elsewhere has been the topic of conversation for a few weeks now, but all the posturing in the world isn't going to bring these emails back.

The UK has its own problems with keeping relevant records intact and accessible. A little over a week ago, the UK Foreign Office was asked to produce documents detailing the use of its Diego Garcia base for CIA extraordinary rendition flights. In a variation of the "computer ate my homework," the Foreign Office offered up this explanation for its failure to produce the requested records.

''Daily occurrence logs, which record the flights landing and taking off, cover the period since 2003. Though there are some limited records from 2002, I understand they are incomplete due to water damage.''

Oh, well. It's only stuff from 2002 that's somehow too wet to recover. Out of a decade's worth of records, that's not too bad. Except that records from 2002 are exactly the records pertinent to the discussion, as indirectly acknowledged by a Foreign Office spokeswoman: read more>>>

* * * The British Iraq War Inquiry * * * All but those correspondence, bush/blair, and any still classified closed door testimony and reports!!

Iraq War Promoted Terrorism Rather Than Reducing It