Laid Saidi was expelled from Tanzania for being a Wahhabist he was then secretly taken to Afghanistan by American agents and imprisoned for sixteen months, before being released in Algeria without charges. He says he was tortured during his incarceration. Let me observe that I really liked Kevin Drum's comments on Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine and the book itself is a must-read.

Suskind tells a story in which you have an administration that, at the beginning, simply doesn't know very much about international terrorism and doesn't care to learn much more about it. They think other things are more important, they have a limited amount of time, and so they're focused on that. Then comes 9/11 -- a devastating event. And, of course, at that time nobody knew what else might be coming down the pike. Decisions needed to be made, and quickly, by people who weren't especially well-versed in the situation.

Thus, for reasons that under the circumstances you have to consider at least understandable, the decision was made to radically reduce the evidentiary threshold for taking action and the procedural constraints on action.

I think you can see why this seemed like a good idea. The US government has all these giant security institutions at its disposal, and the basic first instinct was that in the wake of 9/11 they needed to be unleashed or unshackled or the metaphor of your choice. The trouble is that, in practice, you need evidentiary standards to make sure that your institutions are doing something meaningful with their time. Saidi's case doesn't make it into the book, but it's totally typical of the sort of stuff that wound up going down. Under the "one percent" theory of threat-mitigation lots and lots of time was spent interrogating people who didn't really know anything. "Agressive" interrogation methods were approved. So you had lots of people who didn't really no anything being leaned on extremely hard to say something which naturally took you from a medium-sized pool of detainees who were often the wrong people, to a giant pool of basically useless information.

Then people had to go track that down. And so on and so forth -- wastes of time.

The absence of procedural constraints and the perceived need for secrecy, meanwhile, let all sorts of dirty dealing enter into the picture. When things are done that don't work, they don't come to light. Positive spin is put on actions, sometimes by the White House sometimes by the mid-level figures taking the actions. Things that were set in motion in the panicked days of September and October 2001 don't get corrected or altered as new information becomes available.

What's more, the "one percent" principle is, when you get down to it, totally useless as a guide to action. You simply can't take decisive action to counter everything that has a 1-in-a-100 chance of being a threat. It's meaningless. But it's a good excuse -- a rationalization -- for not acquiring better information, for not learning about the problem, for not thinking about the long-term viability of anything, and for basically proceeding on the basic of knee-jerk reactions and longstanding beliefs. Anything or nothing can be justified from within this framework, and operating outside the boundaries of law and oversight nobody needs to know about it even though the whole thing's gone horribly awry.