Torture memos

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Please note the critical difference in these two statements.

We know when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al Qaeda operative. We don't know who that was. We don't know when the J-I guys were arrested, but we know it's later:

And we also know that J-I remained active and powerful in October 2002 when they carried out the Bali bombings.

And we know that ringleader Hambali was arrested in August 2003 in Thailand.

Makes sense that it would take that kind of time. The torture memo I referenced lays out what leads to it:

Based on all this and the flawed Timothy Noah piece in Slate, I'll guess this: the plot began to unravel in the first early 2002 arrest, but we didn't necessarily KNOW that it was unraveling, and the trail that led to the arrests of the rest of the cell in late 2003 were provided by later intelligence. KSM intel figured into subsequent understanding of the plot and associated arrests.

UT....here is another perspective:

The description of the plot was based on claims made by Mohammed, who has said he was the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, during interrogations after his capture in Pakistan in March 2003. But those familiar with Mohammed’s comments and the alleged plot have suggested that, at most, it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities.

In March 2004, the Los Angeles Police Department confirmed that it had been briefed on Mohammed’s statements. “We were made aware of that information last spring,” John Miller, then the LAPD’s top anti-terrorism official, said at the time.

On Friday, Miller – now the chief spokesman for the FBI – said only that the LAPD had discussed the matter in depth with the Joint Terrorism Task Force and concluded that whatever plot that had existed in its initial stages already had been dismantled with the arrest of Al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia and elsewhere.

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.

http://articles.latimes.com/p/2005/o...ion/na-terror8

I guess it is a matter of interpretation and who one chooses to believe.