It is sometimes disorienting to note that a federal bureaucracy that we have grown to mistrust over the past decade occasionally can be a source of reliable information that actually discredits what the government itself is saying. On those all too rare occasions Leviathan appears to be so unfocused that his right hand and left hand are out of sync. To cite only one example, I have a number times noted that while the White House and Congress continue to hype the terrorist threat for political and budgetary reasons the State Department’s annual Country Reports on Terrorism, if read carefully, actually demonstrates that terrorism is in precipitous decline worldwide.

Two investigative reports that were classified to prevent the information they contained from becoming public have recently been in the news. One is the Senate Intelligence Committee’s exhaustive review of the efficacy of the torture that was carried out by CIA officers in 2002-6 and the other is the 28 pages long chapter on Saudi Arabian involvement that was redacted from the final published version of the 9/11 Commission’s report. The reports are important because they together illustrate different ways in which the rule of law was largely ignored by the White House in the wake of 9/11. They also challenge the established narratives on 9/11 itself and the intelligence community response to the alleged threat posed by terrorism.