I wish you were this irate when the Bush Admin pulled hoax terror alerts on NYC

Stephanie

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Thu Feb-01-07 08:06 PM
Original message

I wish you were this irate when the Bush Admin pulled hoax terror alerts on NYC

Edited on Thu Feb-01-07 08:12 PM by Stephanie

Believe me, New York was in no mood to be fucked with, but that didn't stop the Bush Admin from calling a fake terror alert whenever they needed a bump. For instance, when they wanted to lock down the city prior to the 2004 Republican Convention, they simply announced that a laptop they'd found in Afghanistan contained maps of NYC buildings, including the Citicorp. They left out the fact that they'd found the laptop months earlier, and that the files had last been opened four years prior. So that was enough reason to lock down the city, close midtown for a few days, and put us all on high alert until the convention was over. That justified extreme police measures, unjustified arrests, and illegal imprisonments (the NYCLU sued) to protect the Coward-in-Chief while he was here exploiting our heartbreak for his political advantage.

So Boston, I feel your pain. It sucks to be frightened for no reason. Not to mention the inconvenience, and the cost. But you are not the first city to go through it. We've been living with it on a regular basis for the last six years (remember anthrax?). But in our case the perpetrators were not some crazy artists, but the President of the United States and his enablers. And that's not even funny.

The scare dovetailed perfectly with the Bush/Cheney political strategy. Indeed, the entire re-election campaign was a terrorist-themed event, with officials--including Ridge--stressing to reporters they were convinced Al Qaeda was planning a pre-election day strike inside America. To formalize the theory, the Bush-appointed head of the US Election Assistance Commission wrote to Ridge asking about the possibility of postponing the 2004 presidential election in the event it was interrupted by a terrorist attack.

Rather than describing the uncovering of a specific Al Qaeda terror plot, the way British intelligence officials claimed to have done this summer, what Ridge was touting on August 1 was newly uncovered and detailed surveillance intelligence showing that Al Qaeda members had been casing the World Bank headquarters in Washington, the Citicorp building in New York City and the Prudential financial headquarters in Newark, New Jersey. What Ridge failed to mention, and what government officials seemed to purposely obfuscate, was that the surveillance intelligence predated 9/11--which raised serious doubts about how imminent (or "near term") the threat uncovered actually was. (A spokesman for the World Bank later dismissed the uncovered information as being "largely out of date.")

Later when pressed about the gaping hole in his presentation, Ridge stamped his feet, insisting, "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." It should be noted though, that during the 2004 campaign season Ridge met privately with two key Republican pollsters, Frank Luntz and Bill McInturff, and took sixteen trips to visit ten presidential battleground states between late May and late October.

***

Not surprisingly, few of the sources raised serious questions or doubts about Ridge's handling of the terror scare. As for the revelation that the startling intelligence was actually four years old--a fact that came out days after the warning, thanks to reports in the Washington Post and New York Times, Time dutifully quoted "an FBI official" who dismissed the time stamp as "immaterial."

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060925/boehlert/2