Spaking of jokes, enter Fox"News".
Marc Thiessen, it seems, suffers from some specific form of memory loss that appears to only take place within the brains of Right-wing Republicans. Timothy Noah writes in The Slate:
What clinches the falsity of Thiessen's claim, however (and that of the memo he cites, and that of an unnamed Central Intelligence Agency spokesman who today seconded Thessen's argument), is chronology. In a White House press briefing, Bush's counterterrorism chief, Frances Fragos Townsend, told reporters that the cell leader was arrested in February 2002, and "at that point, the other members of the cell" (later arrested) "believed that the West Coast plot has been canceled, was not going forward" [italics mine]. A subsequent fact sheet released by the Bush White House states, "In 2002, we broke up [italics mine] a plot by KSM to hijack an airplane and fly it into the tallest building on the West Coast." These two statements make clear that however far the plot to attack the Library Tower ever got—an unnamed senior FBI official would later tell the Los Angeles Times that Bush's characterization of it as a "disrupted plot" was "ludicrous"—that plot was foiled in 2002. But Sheikh Mohammed wasn't captured until March 2003.
One would think that if Fox, and the pundits and commentators they employ, takes the issue of national security seriously that they would at least be able to grasp the basics of a timeline of events.
More from Media Matters
The response to this would most likely be, "but we stopped an attack", and that's great. But the fact that they are blatantly rewriting the history of events in order to validate torture techniques that have no proven track-record of providing actionable intelligence kind of takes lying to a whole new level.
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