This is the “ticking time bomb” scenario that everyone keeps talking about. Bill O’Reilly ranting about imminent threats. That’s the phrase that I hear people using.
It took a week for Ashcroft to find these techniques legally defensible. It seems to me that is rather a long time. When I hear imminent threat I think about something happening within a few hours to a day or so. For example, “The stranded boaters were in imminent danger of being swept away by the flooding river”. It would sound strange to say that the unfortunate rafters were in imminent danger of being swept away by a river next week.
This Glen Beck guy keeps talking about how we need to cultivate a “nine-twelve” attitude. A week would be more like “nine-nineteen”.
Here is the clincher though; Abu Zubaydah was captured March 28, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in February or March of 2003. People keep putting forward that waterboarding these guys was imperative given the likelihood that al-Qaeda would launch more attacks. But the time-line just doesn’t match the sense of urgency.
This is the “ticking time bomb” scenario that everyone keeps talking about. Bill O’Reilly ranting about imminent threats. That’s the phrase that I hear people using.
ReplyDeleteIt took a week for Ashcroft to find these techniques legally defensible. It seems to me that is rather a long time. When I hear imminent threat I think about something happening within a few hours to a day or so. For example, “The stranded boaters were in imminent danger of being swept away by the flooding river”. It would sound strange to say that the unfortunate rafters were in imminent danger of being swept away by a river next week.
This Glen Beck guy keeps talking about how we need to cultivate a “nine-twelve” attitude. A week would be more like “nine-nineteen”.
Here is the clincher though; Abu Zubaydah was captured March 28, 2002. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was captured in February or March of 2003. People keep putting forward that waterboarding these guys was imperative given the likelihood that al-Qaeda would launch more attacks. But the time-line just doesn’t match the sense of urgency.