"The real question was, here we had this information, Bin Laden intends to strike in the United States. We knew they had struck before in 1993 at the World Trade Center in the first bombing of the trade center"
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There is a courtroom cadence to Ben-Veniste's line: the insistence on "the real question" signals a prosecutor narrowing the frame, stripping away alibis and bureaucratic fog until what's left is culpability. He isn't litigating whether the warning existed; he's litigating what a responsible state does once it possesses it. That pivot from information to obligation is the whole move.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost clunky, because plainness reads as fact-pattern rather than polemic. "Here we had this information" sounds like an exhibit being placed on the table. Then he drops the most radioactive clause in modern American memory - "intends to strike in the United States" - and immediately anchors it in precedent: 1993. That's not just background; it's a reminder that the threat was already domestic, already real, already demonstrated against an iconic target. By invoking the first World Trade Center bombing, he collapses the comforting pre-9/11 narrative that terrorism was something happening "over there."
The subtext is institutional: intelligence failures are rarely about total ignorance; they're about fragmentation, incentives, and the human tendency to treat warnings as abstractions until they're casualties. Ben-Veniste, a lawyer, is making a standard liability argument in the language of national security: foreseeability. If you knew there was intent, and you knew there was capability, the only remaining question is what was done - and who decided not to do it.
The phrasing is deliberately plain, almost clunky, because plainness reads as fact-pattern rather than polemic. "Here we had this information" sounds like an exhibit being placed on the table. Then he drops the most radioactive clause in modern American memory - "intends to strike in the United States" - and immediately anchors it in precedent: 1993. That's not just background; it's a reminder that the threat was already domestic, already real, already demonstrated against an iconic target. By invoking the first World Trade Center bombing, he collapses the comforting pre-9/11 narrative that terrorism was something happening "over there."
The subtext is institutional: intelligence failures are rarely about total ignorance; they're about fragmentation, incentives, and the human tendency to treat warnings as abstractions until they're casualties. Ben-Veniste, a lawyer, is making a standard liability argument in the language of national security: foreseeability. If you knew there was intent, and you knew there was capability, the only remaining question is what was done - and who decided not to do it.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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