Internal 9/11 Commission Memo Complaining About Lack Of Information From Pentagon About Detainees

MEMORANDUM To: From: Date: Re:

Front Office Team 1A October 29, 2003 DoD Compliance

This memorandum addresses significant concerns that we have raised on several prior occasions regarding the Defense Department's compliance - or more precisely, lack thereof- with respect to DoD Document Request No. 3 and the four supplements thereto. In these document requests, which mirror similar requests concurrently sent to the CIA and FBI, the Commission asked for "[a]ll reports of intelligence information obtained from interrogations of over 100 individuals whom we believe are in U.S. or foreign custody and who may have information relevant to the 9/11 attacks and/or al-Qaeda. The minimal response received to date, together with the complete lack of progress made in recent weeks to improve (oriuvun lu di3CT>st/) this response with DoD, is not encouraging. We believe this issue must be addressed definitively and immediately if the Commission intends to fulfill its mandate to provide a full accounting of the events of 9/11 in a timely fashion. Put simply, the clock is running out and we cannot afford further delay. Document Request No. 3, dated June 6, 2003, asked for interrogation reports of some 40 detainees. The first supplement to this request, dated June 11, 2003, asked for similar reports for an additional 10 detainees. The second supplement, dated July 31, 2003, added 26 individuals to the earlier lists. The third and fourth supplements, dated September 30, 2003 and October 24, 2003, respectively, requested interrogation reports for an additional 35 detainees. Thus, since June, the Commission has requested the interrogation reports of some 111 individuals. To date, the DoD has provided the Commission with 70 documents (a stack about two inches high) in response to Document Request No. 3 and all four of the supplements - the CIA and the FBI have, in response to their parallel requests, produced thousands of pages of documents. The DoD response was produced on August 5, 2003 and included documents responsive to only 10 detainees from the initial request. We have received no documents relating to the other 30 detainees on the initial request; no update to the DoD August 5, 2003 production (the CIA, for instance, has provided - albeit often belatedly the Commission with monthly updates to its response to the detainee request, since the interrogations of the relevant individuals are ongoing); and no response at all with respect to any of the detainees named in the first, second, third, or fourth supplements. Perhaps the only thing more distressing than the quantity of the DoD response to date has been the quality of that respons^. We have received no write-ups, reports, or even detailed summaries of detainee interrogations - the August 5, 2003 response appears to consist only of finished intelligence. The Front Office appears to have agreed that DoD is required only to produce "disseminated intelligence" in responding to this document request (at least initially). Yet five months after DoD received the initial list of detainees, there is still confusion about what should reproduced under this agreement.

Recent attempts to clarify- with the aim of improving - the situation have proved futile. Our points of contact at Ddp have repeatedly/p^stponed or cancelled meetings to address this issue. Moreover, we ha\ to date ncjffeceived any coherent explanation as to what types of documents are produced^by Do^'from detainee interrogations. Only today, in fact, did one DoD point of contact acknowledge for the first time that interview writeups, or MFRs, of detainee interrogations oast. Five months have passed since the initiafr^quest, and the Commission has been provided virtually no useful information from DoD regarding the interrogations of over 100 detainees. We know it exists - we have seen references in DoD finished intelligence to information gleaned frtfm interrogations of individuakNbr whom we have received negative results from th6 CIA and the FBI. There is no tirne\for further accommodation, and certainly no reason to believe that any informal, indefinite\non-written agreements on this issue will produce satisfactory results. We believe that me combination of DoD's unresponsiveness to date and the passage of time warrants exercise of the Commission's subpoena power in this instance.