Complete 911 Timeline: Al-Qaeda in Spain, 9/11 Commission’s Investigation of NSA, Torture - Additions as of April 27, 2008

Complete 911 Timeline: Al-Qaeda in Spain, 9/11 Commission’s Investigation of NSA, Torture - Additions as of April 27, 2008

Many of this week’s new entries deal with al-Qaeda in Spain and the collection of informants and surveillance targets that performed the 2004 Madrid train bombings. Spanish authorities first began monitoring the main al-Qaeda cell in Spain in 1995, later linking it to the Hamburg cell that provided three of the alleged 9/11 pilots, and watching it commit an interesting variety of crimes. The Spanish learned the cell was sending recruits to al-Qaeda training camps, and found out that al-Qaeda had established a camp in Indonesia, but did not bother to tell the Indonesian authorities about it.

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In torture, Justice Department lawyer John Yoo said the military could ignore a raft of irksome laws in 2003, and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice permitted harsh tactics to be used on a detainee a couple of months later. President George Bush recently admitted he knew about such high-level approvals of the harsh techniques, and an al-Qaeda leader arrested in 2002 has never emerged from the archipelago of black sites.

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