In response to my post
below about the chronology surrounding the Library Tower plot, a
reader notes a 2005 LA Times article, which reported:
Federal counter-terrorism officials on Friday disclosed for the
first time that during his interrogations, Mohammed said he
hadn't completely abandoned the prospect of a second wave of
attacks, but had turned the idea over to a trusted aide named
Hambali, the chief of operations for an Al Qaeda affiliate
group in South Asia, Jemaah Islamiyah.
Hambali, also known as Riduan Isamuddin, in turn is believed to
have chosen several men to launch the attacks, including a
pilot, and had set aside some money to pay for them, according
to one senior counter-terrorism official.
Those men were soon captured, however, and the plot never
progressed past the planning stages, according to several
counter-terrorism officials.
"To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just
ludicrous," said one senior FBI official, who spoke on
condition of anonymity in accordance with departmental
guidelines.
So, that explains the CIA version of the timeline -- that there
was one plot on the building broken up in 2002, and a new plot
underway in 2003, and it was the latter one that was thwarted by
information provided by KSM. But then the we're still left with a
debate over how far along the plot was, and more abstractly, how
far along a terrorist plot has to be before a government gets
credit for thwarting it.
This is, I think, one of the most difficult aspects of evaluating
counterterrorism policy -- that we see the reality of the
controversial actions taken in the name of preventing attacks,
but the prospect of an attack always remains theoretical. Thus,
anybody opposed to a given policy can claim that the plot would
have never actually materialized, while those in favor of a given
policy can claim that the policy saved lives. If a few men of
modest resources discuss a plan to destroy the Empire State
Building that they're unlikely to pull off, how far do we go to
disrupt them? On the other hand if we're able to disrupt such
plots in the early stages, isn't that a good thing? Isn't that
precisely what successful counterterrorism looks like? Isn't that
the kind of detective work that we failed to do on Sept. 11? In
the early stages, if you had read that a group of terrorists was
planning on sending men to hijack airplanes with box-cutters and
fly them into buildings, destroying the Twin Towers and damaging
the Pentagon, and killing 3,000 people, it probably would have
sounded far fetched to most people.
Taken together, this is all the more reason why the government
has to release more information about what actually went on so
that we can have an informed debate. This shouldn't be
ideological. On an issue like health care, before opposing sides
get into practical policy disputes, there is a basic
philosophical difference as to whether it is a proper function of
government to provide everybody with health care. But there's no
reason why conservatives, as a matter of ideology, should be
committed to defending the interrogation techniques used during
the Bush administration. All that should matter is whether or not
they made us safer relative to the damage those practices did to
our image around the world, as well as to undermine American
resolve in the War on Terror. And we simply do not have enough
information at this point to honestly assess this question.
