1. “Newly Found Document Indicates Bush Administration Knew Repeat Of 9/11 Unlikely By 2003
The item was entitled “Terrorism Complexities Make Repeating September 11 Difficult” and was circulated to top policy officials on December 16, 2003.
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First, there was no announcement by the government that a repeat of 9/11 was unlikely. In fact, just five days later there was a major terror alert.
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The contradiction here is clear to see: the administration reported internally that it would be hard for al-Qaeda to pull off another spectacular attack, but the public learned nothing of this and the fearmongering continued.
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The second issue relates to the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as walling, the belly slap, sleep deprivation and stress positions. Some defenders of torturing detainees have argued that such techniques should be permissible in the event of a “ticking time-bomb” scenario. However, the SEIB title indicates there were at least some people in the administration–and the SEIBs were drafted by the CIA, the agency doing some of the walling–who thought there probably was no ticking time-bomb.
While there may be no legal implications to this, from a certain viewpoint there could well be a difference between torturing detainees in a state of panic about where the next attack might come from, and torturing detainees with the knowledge that there probably wasn’t going to be another attack anyway.
http://www.911blogger.com/node/21119
