Was logging a contributing factor in the Oso Darrington Landslide Disaster?

My condolences and prayers to the victims of this disaster.  The recovery effort continues...

This undated photograph shows the clear cut done above the Oso Landslide area.
In this picture after the landslide, you can see the clear cut area partially regrown.

It is a legitimate question to ask.  It is almost certain that there will be litigation over it.  The short answer is maybe (but it is definitely not proven). When you have a clear-cut that is approximately nine years old, the replanted trees are fairly well established (trees grow fast in the Pacific Northwest's rainy and mild climate). The photographs suggest to me the slide started at the bottom, not the top of the slope (although I am no expert). It seems unlikely rainfall perked down through a partially regrown clear-cut at the top and was the cause that destabilized the toe of that slope. The hillside was being cut at its toe by the river (which was also higher given the rain). There is intensive investigation going on now.  Ultimately the cause of the landslide is predominately the hillside itself (a condition left by retreating glaciers 11,000 years ago), the geology and layout of the site, and a lot of rain. The real lesson here is not building near hillsides that you know are prone to slides.

Rainfall leading up to the landslide

A re-activation of an old landslideAccording to Dave Petley, Professor of Hazard and Risk in the Department of Geography at Durham University in the United Kingdom, it is clear that major landslides have occurred here on many previous occasions, so much so that the landslide is known as either the Hazel landslide or the Steelhead landslide. In his excellent Landslide Blog, my go-to source of information for any landslide, he writes: "The landslide has been widely reported as a mudslide. In terms of the lower portion, which did the damage, this is correct, although in places it might have been more of a mudflow than a mudslide. However, the upper portion is a rotational landslide–the rotated block with the fallen trees is very clear. A working hypothesis would be that this block failed catastrophically, transferring load onto the block below, which in turn generated very high pore water pressures, causing fluidisation and a very rapid mudflow that struck the settlements across the river." He writes that the last event on a similar scale he knows of was the 25th December 2003 debris flow in San Bernadino County, California, which killed sixteen people. Weather historian Christopher C. Burt has a post about the worst landslides in U.S. history, which puts this week's landslide in context.
The Yakima Herald has a very nice article that details the chronology of events on the Oso landslide. This includes:• 1949: A large landslide (1000 feet long and 2600 feet wide) affected the river bank• 1951: Another large failure of the slope; the river was partially blocked• 1967: Seattle Times published an article that referred to this site as “Slide Hill”• 1997 report, by Daniel Miller, for the Washington Department of Ecology and the Tualialip Tribes• 1999: US Army Corps of Engineers report by Daniel and Lynne Rodgers Miller that warned of “the potential for a large catastrophic failure”• 25 January 2006: large movement of the Steelhead landslide blocked the river