Manager destroyed air controllers' 9/11 tape

From the NY Times via the Houston Chronicle:

At least six air traffic controllers who dealt with two of the hijacked airliners on Sept. 11, 2001, made a tape recording a few hours later describing the events, but the tape was destroyed by a supervisor without anyone making a transcript or even listening to it, the Transportation Department said Thursday.

The taping began before noon on Sept. 11 at the New York Air Route Traffic Control Center in Ronkonkoma, where about 16 people met in a basement conference room known as the Bat Cave and passed around a microphone, each recalling his or her version of the events of a few hours earlier.

And

A quality-assurance manager at the center destroyed the tape several months after it was made, crushing the cassette in his hand, cutting the tape into little pieces and dropping them in different trash cans around the building, according to the report.

And

The quality-assurance manager told investigators that he had destroyed the tape because he thought making it was contrary to Federal Aviation Administration policy, which calls for written statements, and because he felt that the controllers "were not in the correct frame of mind to have properly consented to the taping" because of the stress of the day.

And finally

The quality-assurance manager destroyed the tape sometime in December 2001, January 2002 or February 2002. By that time he and the center's manager had received an e-mail from the FAA instructing officials to safeguard all records.

Click here for the rest.

Uh...is this setting off anybody else's bullshit meter the way it's setting off mine? Why did this "quality-assurance manager" go to so much trouble to crush the cassette, cut up the tape into little pieces, and then deposit it all in numerous different garbage cans? I mean, okay, maybe this is legit, but it sure smells rank, and simply adds to my dawning 9/11 realization that Bush knew.

This is screwy, and if the Bush administration wants people to think that this was just some innocent mistake, they're going to have to explain what the hell was up with this in much more detail.

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