Last night Keith Olbermann reviewed “The Nexus of Politics and Terror,” and considered how often heightened terror alerts seem to come just when the Bush administration wants to distract us from negative news, or needs a P.R. boost.
The basis of all this, at heart: remarks made on May 10, 2005, by a former Bush administration official discussing the old color-coded terror threat warning system. More often than not, he said, “We were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment, sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on alert. There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, ‘For that?'”
The speaker was the first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge. In the light of those remarks and his criticism this week of the vice president for politicizing terror in the context of the Connecticut senatorial primary, it is imperative that we examine each of the coincidences of timing since 2002, including the one last week in which excoriating comments by leading Republicans about leading Democrats just happened to precede arrests in a vast purported terror plot, arrests that we now know were carried out on a timeline requested not by the British, nor necessitated by the evidence, but requested by this government.
Crooks and Liars has the video. It’s a big file, but if you have high-speed internet access, it’s worth watching.
Post a Comment
No personal attacks on any of the participants here.