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sisyphusshruggedIn the beginning was the terror alert
So on the day John Kerry gave the most important speech of his career - his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention - the Pakistanis announced the capture of a "high value" Al Qaeda target, keeping precisely to the schedule predicted beforehand by John Judis and Spencer Ackerman in The New Republic:
But according to this ISI official, a White House aide told ul-Haq last spring that "it would be best if the arrest or killing of [any] HVT were announced on twenty-six, twenty-seven, or twenty-eight July"--the first three days of the Democratic National Convention in Boston.
(Granted, according to the TNR, the Bushies asked for Osama, and instead only got a semi-celebrity terrorist. But when you're an incumbent president who can't crack 50% approval in the polls, you take what you can get.)
Then, right after Kerry's speech - and right as the Bush-Cheney campaign swung into its post-convention counterattack - we got the by-now familiar threat warning - but this time with enough scary specifics to cut through the by-now customary bored response from the press and the public.
And then, on Sunday, Department of Reelection Security Secretary Tom Ridge emerged - just in time to make the evening news shows - to tell us that Al Qaeda is (note the use of the present tense) looking at a number of "high-value targets" of its own in New York and Washington:
As of now, this is what we know: Reports indicate that al-Qaida is targeting several specific buildings, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in the District of Columbia, Prudential Financial in northern New Jersey, and Citigroup buildings and the New York Stock Exchange in New York.
The fact that our crack intelligence agencies have such real-time information in their capable hands, Ridge assured us, is "the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror."
This, in turn, set up Commander Codpiece's press conference today, in which he vowed to enact - more or less verbatim - the recommendations of the 9/11 investigating commission, that being the same commission he tried for months to block, and then to shut down prematurely (with a devious assist from Denny Hastert).
We are told, however (and I have Holy Joe Lieberman's word on this), that this sudden flurry of activity has absolutely nothing to do with polls showing John Kerry narrowing the gap with Bush on the question of who would do a better job of fighting terrorism. Or with the fact that the latest ABC/Washington Post poll actually shows Kerry outranking ex-Lt. Shrub on the question of who is more qualified to be the nation's commander in chief.
That's why I was startled to read tonight that the intelligence information that triggered the latest threat scare - and which Ridge breathlessly described as as evidence of imminent danger - actually dates from before 9/11...
Bush interrupts family wedding, fishing to tell us we aren't safe
President Bush warned Americans on Saturday last weekend's terrorism alert was another sign the country was still not safe but said he was taking steps to prevent future attacks.
Alert levels were raised for specific locations in New York City, Washington and New Jersey after a top-level review of information that al Qaeda may be plotting to attack financial institutions including the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank.
"We're doing everything we can in our power to confront the danger," Bush said in his weekly radio address. "We're making good progress in protecting our people and bringing our enemies to account."
The administration has been facing tough questions after it became known that some of the information that led to the elevated alert was three years old.
Bush defended the new alerts, stating new information gleaned from arrests in Pakistan and other new intelligence suggested that al Qaeda had recently updated information on those potential targets.
"We're still not safe," said Bush, who was spending the weekend at his family's oceanfront compound in Maine to attend the wedding of his nephew, George P. Bush, the son of Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He also found time to do some fishing with his twin daughters and father, former President George Bush.
This just in from the Nation's Capital...
Because of the code orange here in the District of Columbia several public streets have been closed down and others have major checkpoints at them. Problem is, two of the streets (Independence Ave. and Constitution Ave) that have been closed in areas are the evacuation routes in case of a terrorist attack. Those are two of the few main streets that run in an east/west direction here.
Mayor Anthony Williams said in a press conference yesterday if you shut down every street around monuments here in town, you 'shut down the whole damn city'. Also, the Feds didn't bother informing the Metro PD of the closures until they'd already been set up.
and it might just get worse
Federal officials may restrict truck traffic and fence sidewalks on 15th Street NW near the White House and Treasury Department, authorities said yesterday, as heavily armed police began inspecting cars, trucks and buses at more than a dozen checkpoints around the U.S. Capitol.
Secret Service and Department of Homeland Security officials confirmed that additional precautions next to the Treasury Department headquarters have been under discussion since Sunday, when the Bush administration announced a heightened terror threat to financial institutions in Washington, New York City and New Jersey. A decision could come as soon as today.
here in NY,
I haven't gone out to get the NY Times yet this morning, but this one I want to read for myself. It's to Mayor Bloomberg's credit that he pointed out in his news conference on Sunday that he didn't know how old the information was on which the latest terrorist alert is based. Maybe he really didn't know yet, but now he does. The fact that we have this information does seem to be new. The fact that the information itself is three and four years old and predates the attack on the WTC is what we should have been told and, of course, weren't told. I've probably been as angry as I am this morning, but not often.
Yeah, it's shocking to learn how complete the information gathered by the terrorists really was, but the odds are very high that the information was important to the terrorists while making the choice of targets for 9/11 2001 and we don't really need to have traffic jams that are 4 and 5 miles long or police in battle gear carrying assult rifles at this moment. Yeah, it's not a bad idea to generally increase security for financially important buildings, and not just the ones mentioned in the information on that captured hard disk in Pakistan. And yeah, now that a little bit more of the truth is coming out, it couldn't be more obvious that the administration is cynically issuing terrorist alerts whenever this gives them some political advantage.
Sadly, even the "security precautions" are being applied cynically. Those who live behind the Citicorp headquarters are trying to point out that there's now plenty of security in front of the building, barricades, police presence, etc. along Lexington Ave. which is well traveled, and NOTHING, no extra security, behind the building, which is equally vulnerable. So -- that's pure theater. On the other hand, the Mayor is taking advantage of the situation to provide extra security for areas that really need it regardless, like Grand Central Station.
Nobody's considering the psychological cost of fake terrorist alerts on the citizens of NYC. How about the effect on the schoolchildren who live near the WTC site and were so badly affected on 9/11? What do their parents tell them now? Not to mention the adults still suffering from PTSD. Or the workers trudging bravely off to work in the supposedly threatened buildings. How sweet of Laura Bush and her twins to show up for coffee with them! As though this were somehow a brave and noble sacrifice? I wonder if she brought cookies?
First responders don't appear to have been sure of anything
It sure sounded real, didn’t it? “A serious business,” said President George W. Bush. “Alarming,” said Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge. “We will spare no expense,” said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Whether National Security Adviser Condoleezza “Mushroom Cloud” Rice, who has been keeping a low profile lately, said anything at all I’m not sure.
Speaking of Rice, the question today is whether the threat was imminent, “historical,” off in the future, or possibly something else entirely. As an editorial in today’s Washington Post states:
[A]lthough this latest information pointed to precise targets, only a broad time frame was supplied. Some of the information reportedly in al Qaeda’s possession, on the structure of the buildings and their security, had been collected over a period of years. World Bank President James D. Wolfensohn told his colleagues yesterday that “there is no information that indicates a specific time for these attacks.” Hence the odd sight of police pulling trucks over, as if attacks were imminent, and journalists parking their trucks directly in front of the buildings, as if attacks were only theoretical.
Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say
Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.
But the officials continued to regard the information as significant and troubling because the reconnaissance already conducted has provided Al Qaeda with the knowledge necessary to carry out attacks against the sites in Manhattan, Washington and Newark. They said Al Qaeda had often struck years after its operatives began surveillance of an intended target.
Taken together with a separate, more general stream of intelligence, which indicates that Al Qaeda intends to strike in the United States this year, possibly in New York or Washington, the officials said even the dated but highly detailed evidence of surveillance was sufficient to prompt the authorities to undertake a global effort to track down the unidentified suspects involved in the surveillance operations.
"You could say that the bulk of this information is old, but we know that Al Qaeda collects, collects, collects until they're comfortable,'' said one senior government official. "Only then do they carry out an operation. And there are signs that some of this may have been updated or may be more recent.''
Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on Monday in an interview on PBS that surveillance reports, apparently collected by Qaeda operatives had been "gathered in 2000 and 2001.'' But she added that information may have been updated as recently as January.
The comments of government officials on Monday seemed softer in tone than the warning issued the day before. On Sunday, officials were circumspect in discussing when the surveillance of the financial institutions had occurred, and Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge cited the quantity of intelligence from "multiple reporting streams'' that he said was "alarming in both the amount and specificity of the information.''
the traditional media played this as a triumph for the current administration, but our allies didn't agree
Based on an admittedly quick scan of the usual mainstream media suspects, it looks like most outlets are still captivated by the spy thriller details of the story, and dutifully lapping up the usual "you are there" details spoon fed them by the Bush PR juggernaut (which is suddenly making Richard Clarke-level anti-terrorism officials available for on-the-record interviews):
It's called the president's Daily Threat Report (PDTR), or, in bureaucratic shorthand, the Putter ... At 6:40 a.m. on Friday, July 30, Fran Townsend, the president's homeland-security adviser and counterterror chief for the national-security staff, opened up her red-striped Putter and received a jolt ...
In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Townsend recalled thinking, "This is the real deal"Ña chance to crack the plot.
What they ended up cracking, however, was the operational security of one of the most successful intelligence penetrations of al-Qaeda in the organization's history. Which has some of our British allies wondering about Team Bush's priorities:
Is that really the job of a senior cabinet minister in charge of counter-terrorism? To feed the media? To increase concern? To have something to say, whatever it is, in order to satisfy the insatiable desire to hear somebody saying something?
Some questions, of course, answer themselves.
the White House says that there was too a terror risk, but by bravely raising the alert level, the White House may just have disrupted whatever it was
Al Qaeda militants are hoping to launch a major attack in the United States that will be even deadlier and more spectacular than the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, a top White House adviser said today.
"They want something bigger than 9/11, they want a catastrophic attack," Frances Townsend, US President George W Bush's homeland security adviser, told the Fox News Sunday program.
Ms Townsend made her remarks one week after US officials raised the terror alert levels in the financial sectors of Washington and the New York area, after receiving intelligence of an impending Al Qaeda strike.
The Bush administration's decision was criticised because of its reliance on three-year-old intelligence, but Ms Townsend said that the threat was current and real, and said raising the alert appeared to have slowed the planning for a strike.
"The question is did we disrupt all of it or a part of it," Ms Townsend said.
A bit of a giggle from Secretary Ridge, who announced the raised terror status with a glowing tribute to his boss
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge defended the extensive security cordons thrown up this week in three U.S. cities, saying the threat of terrorist attack is real despite indications that al-Qaeda surveillance of suspected targets occurred years ago.
There was strong evidence that al-Qaeda had updated those files recently and that multiple sources of intelligence information pointed to an attack in the coming months, Mr. Ridge said yesterday.
As some skeptics voiced suggestions that the Bush administration had hyped the threat, Mr. Ridge said, "I wish I could give them all Top Secret clearances and let them review the information that some of us have the responsibility to review."
He rejected assertions that the heightened alert was designed to bolster President George W. Bush's re-election campaign.
"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," he said.
so what's the problem?
Okay, they really have to stop doing this kind of thing. If you want to be prepared for an emergency, we can't have officials saying stuff that isn't true, or even slightly misrepresents the facts:
Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.
Anybody living the United States yesterday was treated to saturation coverage of the discovery of "new threats" from al Qaeda and witnessed key target cities, Washington DC and New York, enact extraordinary security measures. To find out to day that the new information was in fact several years old, with the possibility that "some" of it might have been "updated" as "recently" as January and even then only from publicly available material.
there was, shall we say, a certain amount of skepticism
Ken Layne concludes that our Orange Alert was all politics--if it was a serious threat, after all, what kind of man would send his wife into the middle of it, and there was Laura Bush in Citicorp Center:
KEN LAYNE: After getting through the insane security at CitiBank Headquarters -- caused by four-year-old Evidence of Terror Plans released Sunday to scare the bejesus out of you -- you get to say "Hi" to Laura Bush in the lobby! That's neat.
It's neat when schedules work out that way....
This stinks. Go ahead and say, as Tom Ridge did this morning, "This is not about politics. It's about confidence in government." If you have to deny it's about politics -- while your party is actively campaigning in the locked-down buildings of New York City filled with teevee cameras and photographers and frazzled employees who wonder if today's Terror Day -- then you have done a Poor Job of showing us otherwise.... I don't have a clue what might really be going on. Is the information honest, the threat real and the administration just incredibly bumbling? Well, we know the information wasn't honest. Otherwise, Ridge would've told the truth about the "intelligence" on Sunday during his Scary Show. The threat may indeed be real -- it's sure not News that terrorist have wanted to blow up famous buildings in big cities, is it? -- but it doesn't seem to be "real" in the sense that it required two huge & important American cities to be locked down this week....
Dr. Dean is _seriously_ pissed off about all this, leading Sen. Lieberman to mouth off again in defense of his beloved Republicans
Over the past few days, the former Vermont governor and Democratic Presidential candidate has endured a barrage of bad press and nasty commentary, simply because he expressed honest doubts about the government’s latest terror alarm. Republican pundits and politicians predictably denounced him. Senator John Kerry disowned Dr. Dean’s remarks, and Senator Joe Lieberman went further, suggesting that anyone who harbors such doubts must not be “in their right mind.”
In short, to think that the Bush administration might issue an alert for political advantage is a symptom of madness. The latest news reports, however, indicate that Dr. Dean’s suspicions were hardly unfounded.
On Aug. 1, as every alert citizen knows, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge held an unusual Sunday press conference to announce that the Bush administration had raised its color-coded threat level from yellow to orange in certain selected placesÑin New York and New Jersey’s financial centers and the World Bank headquarters in Washington, D.C. In his opening remarks, Mr. Ridge told America that the decision was provoked by “new and unusually specific information.”
The stolid bureaucrat went on with boilerplate rhetoric about the administration’s brilliant performance in securing the homeland. Somewhat gratuitously, he urged us all to “understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President’s leadership in the war against terror.”
Mr. Ridge did not, however, explain what he meant in describing this scary information as “new.” His response to reporters who asked for more specifics was opaque and nearly incoherent. Within 48 hours, we learned why he wouldn’t give a straight answer.
But first, while most Democrats reacted cautiously, Dr. Dean spoke out on CNN. “I am concerned that every time something happens that’s not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism,’’ he said. “It’s just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there’s some of both in it.”
the White House defends itself: they got the information from a specific, named source. Unfortunately, that source may have been (until that moment) undercover within al Qaeda
"After his capture he admitted being an al Qaeda member and agreed to send e-mails to his contacts," a Pakistani intelligence source told Reuters. "He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz." In its haste to get a scary headline the weekend after the Democratic Convention, did the Bush Administration deliberately blow the cover of one of its best informants within al-Qaeda?
Why yes, he was. Woops.
People, this is bigger than the Plame Affair (as horrible as that outing was). We are locked in a bona fide war against a shadowy enemy. We finally infiltrate an Al Qaida cell, and our asset is burned in a matter of days either out of political expediency or sheer stupidity.
It boggles the mind.
a pretty important asset, too
... [Muhammad Naeem Noor] Khan had been secretly apprehended by Pakistani military intelligence in mid-July, and had been turned into a double agent. He was actively helping investigators penetrate further into al-Qaeda cells and activities via computer, and was still cooperating when the "senior Bush administration" figure told Jehl about him.
Pakistani military intelligence (Inter-Services Intelligence) told Reuters,
"He sent encoded e-mails and received encoded replies. He's a great hacker and even the U.S. agents said he was a computer whiz . . . He was cooperating with interrogators on Sunday and Monday and sent e-mails on both days ..."In other words, the Bush administration just blew the cover of one of the most important assets inside al-Qaeda that the US has ever had.
Dr. Rice admits the whole thing to Wolf Blitzer, who points out that this guy was even more important than we already thought he was:
The story of how the Bush administration prematurely outed Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a double agent working for Pakistan against al-Qaeda, has finally hit cable television news. MSNBC picked up the story on Saturday.
On Sunday at around 12:30 pm, Wolf Blitzer's show referred to it. New York Senator Charles Schumer criticized the Bush administration for revealing Khan's name. He noted the annoyance of British Home Minister Blunkett (see below) and Pakistani Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat with the Americans for blowing Khan's cover. He said Hayat complained that if Khan's name had not been reveaeled to the New York Times by the Bush administration, he might well have provided information that would have led to the capture of Usamah Bin Laden himself!
intelligence experts are aghast
The revelation that a mole within al Qaeda was exposed after Washington launched its "orange alert" this month has shocked security experts, who say the outing of the source may have set back the war on terror.
[...]
"The whole thing smacks of either incompetence or worse," said Tim Ripley, a security expert who writes for Jane's Defense publications. "You have to ask: what are they doing compromising a deep mole within al Qaeda, when it's so difficult to get these guys in there in the first place?
"It goes against all the rules of counter-espionage, counter-terrorism, running agents and so forth. It's not exactly cloak and dagger undercover work if it's on the front pages every time there's a development, is it?"
A source such as Khan -- cooperating with the authorities while staying in active contact with trusting al Qaeda agents -- would be among the most prized assets imaginable, he said.
"Running agents within a terrorist organization is the Holy Grail of intelligence agencies. And to have it blown is a major setback which negates months and years of work, which may be difficult to recover."
the center holds
The one thing the data don't do is disprove the suspicion that the alerts are partly politically motivated. (I'll give you one guess about who's claiming that it does.)
When the Secretary of Homeland Security, a professional politician with no actual security credentials, credits the "President's leadership" as part of his speech announcing the latest alert, it's surely not far-fetched to think he might know it's an election year.
I think John Kerry did the right thing, substantively as well as politically, in disowning Howard Dean's comments on this; public figures need to be careful of what they say, and given that no one outside the government knows how solid the basis for the warnings might be, the rest of us have no choice but to act as if the warnings are real. After all, one of these days there will be a wolf, even if we know that Peter (George)(Tom)(John) is somewhat veridically challenged.
But that's not the same as saying that Dean was wrong. This is an Administration that has lived by Mark Twain's maxim: "Tell the truth, or trump. But take the trick." If people are skeptical of terror warnings coming out of this Administration, it's not without reason.
and the center doesn't hold
Gee, it's funny, but the only newspaper on the North American land mass to pick up the story that Bush, during the latest extremely non-political terror alert, outed a mole that Pakistan placed in AQ, is in Toronto. I wonder why? But read on:
There seems to be a meme that's gotten loose in the blogosphereÑnot, as yet, picked up and amplified by the VWRC, a sign that this story is way too hot for them to handle safelyÑthat somehow the liberals are responsible for Bush's actions...
Dr. Carol isn't quite sure why that is
Juan Cole is, of course, the guy to go to on the story about the terror alert and how the administration burned an intelligence source just to cover their backsides. But I have a problem with this:
So one scenario goes like this. Bush gets the reports that Eisa al-Hindi had been casing the financial institutions, and there was an update as recently as January 2004 in the al-Qaeda file. So this could be a live operation. If Bush doesn't announce it, and al-Qaeda did strike the institutions, then the fact that he knew of the plot beforehand would sink him if it came out (and it would) before the election. So he has to announce the plot. But if he announces it, people are going to suspect that he is wagging the dog and trying to shore up his popularity by playing the terrorism card. So he has to be able to give a credible account of how he got the information. So when the press is skeptical and critical, he decides to give up Khan so as to strengthen his case. In this scenario, he or someone in his immediate circle decides that a mere double agent inside al-Qaeda can be sacrificed if it helps Bush get reelected in the short term.
On the other hand, sheer stupidity cannot be underestimated as an explanatory device in Washington politics.
See, my problem is that the sheer stupidity starts with announcing anything rather than quietly investigating. We don't need the government to tell us there might be terrorists plotting terror; we need them to shut up and stop the terrorists. They can't do that if they are giving press conferences about it - it can only hamper their efforts.
If, indeed, they are making any such efforts, which is questionable. These terror alerts have no purpose other than to keep generating fear. They don't protect us. They're just smoke. They exist to help George Bush's campaign.
we did get this classic Bushism out of the deal
President Bush told a roomful of top Pentagon brass on Thursday that his administration would never stop looking for ways to harm the United States.
The latest installment of misspeak from a president long known for his malapropisms came during a signing ceremony for a new $417 billion defense appropriations bill that includes $25 billion in emergency funding for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we," Bush said.
and for comic relief, we got Kathy "the trowel" Harris, who apparently doesn't read the papers too often, chiming in with what turned out to be a completely invented terrorist alert of her own. No-one in Washington has any idea what she's talking about here.
In an interview after the speech, Harris said she learned from classified information about the 100 potential attacks that have been thwarted since 9/11.
"Actually, it's been more than 100," she said. "It's classified … obviously not classified to me … but things I can't go into detail about."
...
Harris told the audience that while she was in the Midwest recently, the mayor of Carmel, Ind., recounted how a man of Middle Eastern heritage had been arrested. She said hundreds of pounds of explosives were found in his home.
"He had plans to blow up the area's entire power grid," she said.
Pressed after the speech for details about the arrest, Harris said it had not been made public and she asked a reporter not to name the city she mentioned to the audience.
"I probably said too much," Harris said.
the Times felt that the pressure the White House was under from the propwash of the 9/11 Commission Report may have made the White House a bit jumpy about not responding to just about anything
Senior White House officials said Tuesday that the decision to raise the threat level was made at a meeting convened at 4 p.m. on Saturday in the White House Situation Room. Several of the Bush administration's senior counterterrorism officials, who had scattered for the weekend, had to be plugged in by video teleconference monitors.
To two senior White House officials in the meeting, it appeared to be a clear-cut case. It did not occur to these officials as they debated how to go public with the information that had been streaming in about a heightened terrorist threat, they said, that in the coming days the decision would stir confusion and skepticism because much of the intelligence appeared to be three or more years old.
"I've never seen so much pointing in the same direction," one of the senior officials said, referring to the intelligence that prompted the heightened alert. "You think, this is probably as rich as it's ever going to get. I can tell you, if you don't warn now, I don't know when you would."
The intelligence reports received at C.I.A. headquarters and relayed to the White House, the officials said, were increasingly ominous. Much of the information was sent directly to top officials from John McLaughlin, the acting C.I.A. director, who spoke with Frances Fragos Townsend, President Bush's domestic security adviser; via a secure telephone line, he could instantly reach her with the press of a single button.
On Sunday at 2 p.m. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge announced the decision to raise the threat level. Senior administration officials said the action was not driven by election-year considerations, but by intelligence reports that described an orchestrated surveillance operation at several large financial institutions.
It is now apparent that the information had significant gaps and omissions. It was not clear, for example, who was behind the scouting missions, whether these unidentified suspects were still in the United States or even whether their reconnaissance operations, many of which were conducted three or four years ago, represented an aborted plan or were an early warning sign of an active plot.
The new threat information seemed to come at an awkward time for Mr. Bush, who has anchored his re-election campaign on his handling of terrorism, but is still on the defensive because of criticism by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks. Before the hijackings, the commission concluded, the White House reacted too slowly to the reports of a possible terrorist strike. Since the final report on July 22, commission members had been urging the White House to move more swiftly to implement their recommendations.
the Times is also awash with sympathy for Mr. Ridge
Nearly three years after he left his job as governor of Pennsylvania to join the White House's campaign against terrorism, Mr. Ridge has found himself in what associates call a thankless task, buffeted by complaints that he has created confusion and fear in the public's mind. The criticism only intensified after he announced a decision to raise the terror-alert level last Sunday.
Democrats have accused Mr. Ridge of politicizing national security by citing the warnings as an example of presidential leadership.
Mr. Bush's national security aides overshadowed Mr. Ridge at critical moments during deliberations last weekend about the threat, administration officials said. Mr. Ridge's associates said that as homeland security secretary, he had responsibilities to officials outside the White House, for example, notifying hundreds of state and local authorities about the alert, which he does by telephone and teleconferences, before making it public.
Dr. Carol sums up
You know, what really gets to me about that three-year-old threat warning that the administration felt an urgent need to tell us about just at the peak of the Democratic convention isn't just that it was obviously an attempt to bury the convention news, or even that the press is pretending Dean was wrong to be openly cynical about it, but this: They had this warning - three years ago, dammit! - that Al Qaeda was planning an attack on major financial institutions. And they're telling us this now, when they've been trying to tell us all year that they had no idea what Al Qaeda had in mind.
Think about that. They are telling us they knew, because they are that desperate to keep anything positive about Kerry off the front page, and not only are the press going along with it, but they are behaving as if they haven't just had what practically amounts to a confession from the administration. They bloody knew!
the commissioners had mixed feeling about the new terror alerts: on the one hand, they were happy that the White House actually responded to intelligence on a perceived threat, but
But if the week's drama showed a much more agile federal response to fast-breaking events, it also pointed up the government's continuing limitations in infiltrating Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, some terrorism experts said. The United States is getting more on-the-ground support and intelligence from allies like Pakistan since the Sept. 11 attacks, but it is making much less progress in infiltrating Al Qaeda with its own spies and informers.
A result last weekend was that it took intelligence that originated in Pakistan to point officials to detailed Qaeda reconnaissance missions on the streets of New York, Newark and Washington about where security guards were posted, when elevators ran and what coffee shops could be used for cover.
The Sept. 11 commission's investigation showed that "we knew much more about activity abroad than we did about activity in the United States," said Jamie S. Gorelick, a commission member. "And we got much more information abroad from our liaison relationships than we did from our own sources."
Mr. Kean said the new information from Pakistan about the Qaeda reconnaissance missions highlighted the need to find better ways of placing more spies and informers inside Al Qaeda and develop quicker information about terrorist plots.
"It was disturbing that we didn't have any information during the time when they were actually casing these places out," he said. "But until we rebuild the C.I.A.'s covert program - and that could take five years - we just don't have a lot of human intelligence operatives. And until that happens, we have to rely on countries like Pakistan for a lot of our intelligence."
Terrorism experts said the Bush administration may have also hurt its own cause and inspired public skepticism this week in how it alerted the public to the possible attacks. Administration officials did not acknowledge until Monday, a day after declaring a "high risk" of attacks against financial sectors, that much of the new intelligence was based on reconnaissance missions by Qaeda operatives three or four years ago.
Our Fearless Leader's response to the 9/11 Commission Report turns out to be a little bit different than the one the commissioners were hoping for
"White House and Bush campaign officials have long said that the details [of White House counterterrorism proposals] matter far less than the pictures and sounds of Mr. Bush talking in any way about his campaign against terrorism, which polls show is still his strongest card against Mr. Kerry," writes Elizabeth Bumiller in the Times today.
Ain't it the truth!
But wouldn't it be nice if we had a press which would make some effort to point out instances where the 'details' utterly belie what the president says he's doing?
The issue here is the president's supposed embrace of the recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, particularly on the creation of a new National Intelligence Director under whom the heads of the various intelligence agencies would operate.
I was working on another project pretty much constantly through most of the day and heard discussion of this on the cable networks, particularly CNN. What I heard there was that the president had embraced the commission's recommendation on this point while only disagreeing on whether this new head of national intelligence would be housed within the White House or have cabinet rank status outside the White House structure.
Yet it turns out that this is but one, and not at all the most significant way in which the policy the president has embraced differs from that of the commission. In fact, when you look closely at it, it's nothing like what the commission recommended at all. The president went out into the Rose Garden, said he was adopting the commission's proposals. But in fact he was doing close to the opposite, doing more or less what they said shouldn't be done.
9/11 panel dismayed by Bush's reaction
Two members of the Sept. 11 commission criticized President Bush's proposal to create a national intelligence director, telling Congress on Tuesday that the White House plan fails to give the new spy chief the executive powers needed to revamp the nation's intelligence agencies.
Without the power to set budgets and hire and fire senior managers, the new intelligence czar will lack the clout to make major changes at the nation's 15 spy agencies, the commissioners told lawmakers at the first House hearing prompted by the panel's 567-page report on the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
"The person that has the responsibility needs the authority," Democratic commissioner Bob Kerrey, a former Nebraska senator, told the House Government Reform Committee. "Absent that, they're not going to be able to get the job done."
Republican commissioner John Lehman, a former Navy secretary who has been seen as a possible replacement for retiring CIA Director George Tenet, also urged the president to reconsider his proposal to base the director outside the White House. The commission recommended establishing the position within the White House to keep the director from being overshadowed by powerful Cabinet members, such as the defense secretary.
"Our recommendations are not a Chinese menu," Lehman said. "They are a whole system. If all of the important elements are not adopted, it makes it very difficult for the others to succeed."
congressional Critics Say Bush's Intelligence Chief Would Be Toothless
Members of the Sept. 11 commission joined with Congressional Democrats on Tuesday in criticizing President Bush's proposal for creating the job of national intelligence director, saying the plan would not grant nearly enough power to the position.
The criticism came a day after Mr. Bush announced the proposal in response to the commission's final report. It produced conciliatory statements from the White House, which suggested that Mr. Bush was open to negotiation with Congress over far broader powers for the new position.
"The national intelligence director will have the authority he or she needs to do this job," said Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman. "We're going to continue moving forward and talking in more detail about that authority as we move forward and as we work with Congress."
In its report, the bipartisan commission called for establishment of the job, saying it was necessary to end turf battles and duplication among intelligence agencies.
But while Mr. Bush agreed on Monday to create such a post, he rejected the commission's recommendation that the national intelligence director have direct control over the intelligence community's $40 billion annual budget and veto power over the people named to head intelligence agencies. Under the White House proposal, the intelligence director would have far more limited budgetary and personnel authority.
we may already have identified a pocket of resistance: As Defense Chief in 1992, Cheney Opposed Intelligence Czar
While he was defense secretary in 1992, Vice President Cheney said he would recommend a presidential veto of a bill that would have established a director of national intelligence with authority over the Pentagon's intelligence-collection activities.
Cheney's view then, spelled out in two letters on March 17, 1992, to the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, differs from the position President Bush took on Monday. Bush said he supports the creation of a single intelligence director, but with no authority over the Defense Department budget pertaining to intelligence.
The Sept. 11 commission and key Republican and Democratic legislators have again recommended establishing a national intelligence director with budgetary authority over the 15 agencies that make up the U.S. intelligence community, including those in the Pentagon. The issue is central to congressional hearings on the commission's recommendations. Pentagon officials are scheduled to testify next week.
In the past, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has opposed giving the current director of central intelligence budget authority over Pentagon intelligence programs, which involve more than 80 percent of the community's estimated $40 billion in spending. About the Sept. 11 panel's proposals, Rumsfeld has said publicly only that they have "merit" and need study.
Several senior intelligence officials told the House intelligence committee yesterday that giving a new national intelligence director budget authority was essential.
Meanwhile, back in the House, Armed Services is doing their best to quash the whole thing, because the military stands to lose control over a great deal of money (go ahead, guess where most officers go for their second career when they retire)
Duncan Hunter, the GOP Chairman of the House Armed Services was the single biggest player in squashing the Abu Ghraib investigations in the House. Now he aims to do the same with the 9/11 Commission's recommendations:
"It makes sense that you shouldn't have that intelligence stopped or impeded by some guy back in Washington, D.C., who says, 'I want to use that platform for something else,' " Hunter said. "We are not going to be steamrollered in the Armed Services Committee."
Hunter's comments were the first opposition from a chairman of a congressional oversight committee to the sweeping reform recommendations made by the Sept. 11 commission in its final report last month. The Senate and House armed services committees would have jurisdiction over major portions of reform legislation.
Commission members had predicted there would be resistance from the Defense Department and the committees that oversee it, because the military stands to lose control over billions of dollars in intelligence spending, as well as control over satellites and other espionage equipment and resources.
Duncan Hunter's top contributor?
1 Titan Corp $18,000 ...
it appears to be a bicameral problem - neither body wants to clean their own house
Since the 9/11 commission issued its findings on ways the federal government could redesign itself to meet the continued threat of terrorism, a sense of urgency has seized Washington. Rare August hearings are scheduled, memos distributed and high-level briefings conducted as institutions look inward to see what changes they can make.
But as always, introspection goes only so far on Capitol Hill. While Congress is breaking into its traditional recess to consider changes in the executive branch and the way the nation's intelligence agencies operate and report, lawmakers are taking a more circumspect approach on the recommendations that apply most directly to them.
The Senate leadership has yet to identify members of a select working group who are supposed to map a plan for streamlining Congressional oversight. The Republican chairmen of the House and Senate armed services committees - two panels that might have to relinquish significant power - have not offered their views. The bulk of the study to this point has been on how organizations outside Congress can be improved.
And in what amounts to a plea of guilty to a major commission finding - that there are too many committees exercising oversight of intelligence agencies - nine panels scheduled hearings this month on the commission's recommendations.
At one hearing, on Tuesday, John F. Lehman, a former Navy secretary and a Republican member of the commission, warned that Congress should not forget about itself when it comes to changes. Mr. Lehman urged the House and Senate to straighten out their own lines of responsibility before anything else.
"Fix that first, if there has to be a priority, because the rest of the system that we're recommending will not function properly without Congress fixing its own committee structure and jurisdictions," he said.
and that could be a problem, because as it turns out, it's looking like a very high-profile leak came directly from a former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. He doesn't deny it, but he says they can't prove it.
A two-year investigation into how the news media obtained classified intercepted messages has found that Senator Richard C. Shelby, the Alabama Republican and former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, was almost certainly a source, a government official familiar with the inquiry said Thursday.
The investigation remains open, but the Justice Department is unlikely to file criminal charges against the senator, the official said. For now, the department has turned its findings over to the Senate Ethics Committee. A spokesman for Mr. Shelby, Virginia Davis, confirmed that the ethics panel was looking into the matter.
Mr. Shelby left Thursday for an official trip to Australia and Southeast Asia and could not be reached, Ms. Davis said. In a statement, she said the senator, who served on the intelligence panel for eight years, and spent more than five as its chairman, "has a full understanding of the importance of protecting our nation's secrets, and he has never knowingly compromised classified information.''
She added, "He is unaware of any evidence to the contrary."
Astonishingly, although investigators concluded that the Senator was in fact guilty of leaking classified material, Mr. Ashcroft and his Department of Justice [sic] decided not to charge a powerful senator from Our Fearless Leader's side of the aisle
Federal investigators concluded that Sen. Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) divulged classified intercepted messages to the media when he was on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, according to sources familiar with the probe.
Specifically, Fox News chief political correspondent Carl Cameron confirmed to FBI investigators that Shelby verbally divulged the information to him during a June 19, 2002, interview, minutes after Shelby's committee had been given the information in a classified briefing, according to the sources, who declined to be identified because of the sensitive nature of the case.
Cameron did not air the material. Moments after Shelby spoke with Cameron, he met with CNN reporter Dana Bash, and about half an hour after that, CNN broadcast the material, the sources said. CNN cited "two congressional sources" in its report.
The FBI and the U.S. attorney's office pursued the case, and a grand jury was empaneled, but nobody has been charged with any crime. Last month it was revealed that the Justice Department had decided to forgo a criminal prosecution, at least for now, and turned the matter over to the Senate Ethics Committee.
Sen. Waxman has some questions for the Attorney General
A top House Democrat called on Attorney General John Ashcroft on Friday to explain why the Justice Department was letting federal officials cooperate in a Congressional inquiry into the case of Samuel R. Berger despite a current criminal investigation.
The representative, Henry A. Waxman of California, the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, said the department position regarding Mr. Berger, a national security adviser to President Bill Clinton accused of mishandling classified documents, was at odds with how inquiries tied to the Bush administration had been handled.
"For example, in the investigation into the leak of the identity of covert C.I.A. agent Valerie Plame, officials have said repeatedly that they cannot comment because the matter is currently under investigation," Mr. Waxman wrote. He said the policy was "intended to maintain the integrity of the investigation and protect the individuals involved."
[...]
In his letter to the Justice Department, Mr. Waxman said the House committee staff was initially told by prosecutors and archives officials that they could not provide details of the case because of the investigation. But he said more senior department officials reversed that position after being asked to intervene by Republican committee aides.
Justice [sic] wasn't looking too good these days anyway
In blunt, private letters, the Senate Finance Committee chairman told Attorney General John Ashcroft he believes the Justice Department has retaliated against prosecutors in a Detroit terror trial because they cooperated with Congress.
Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, has written Ashcroft or his deputies at least three times to accuse department officials of taking "hostile actions" and "reprisals" against the trial prosecutors.
In one letter, Grassley demanded that Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Convertino and his colleagues in Detroit "be made whole and not suffer reprisals." The senator asked Ashcroft to rectify the matter before it begins "exposing the department to public criticisms."
Grassley also dismissed as "bureaucratic, legalistic spin" the department's explanations for why the prosecution team was subjected to internal investigation.
"Federal law provides individuals who are congressional witnesses or assisting congressional investigations protection from retaliation," Grassley wrote.
Justice officials declined comment.
finally, the dog is not at all happy about the latest news on nuclear plant security
If I don't have that third martini, the terrorists will have won. This seems to be the logic of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's sudden decision to stop publishing nuclear plant safety and security deficiencies, because "it might help the terrorists".
Well, no-- what it actually does is allow the nation's (103?) active nuclear plants to operate under an even greater veil of secrecy than they do now. It is interesting to note, for example, that the Indian Point nuclear plant at Buchanan, New York, around 60 miles North of Manhattan, owned by the Entergy Corporation (which ominously has recently been advertising its safety and reliability... as if any of us have a choice about where our electricity comes from) is often touted for the benefits it provides to its local economy, i.e. virtually no property taxes for around 1,000 or 2,000 residents of Buchanan. New York, and a few jobs in the region (and the electricity of course, which otherwise would have to be acquired on the regional power grid, or supplied by other means, or worst of all, perhaps force reasonable conservation measures).
No one ever looks at the other side of the cost-benefit equation: pretend Mohammed Atta decided to go for broke and crash a 757 into Indian Point, instead of the WTC (the terrorists did fly right over it, after all)...
