Is it mere chance that, while the bunting is still being pulled down at the Fleet Center, the nation is galvanized by another threat warning from the Department of Homeland Defense? Or is there, as we’re hearing, something truly, definitively different about this threat report — something, beyond the specificity of the named targets, that distinguishes it from the previous, transparently manipulative Tom Ridge scares?
The only reasonable answer anyone not sitting in or near the Oval Office can provide is, we don’t know. And that’s precisely the problem the Bush administration has created for the nation.
This morning on NPR I heard Larry Johnson, described as a former counter-terrorism official at the CIA and State Department, debunk the threat report. The information behind this weekend’s alert for key financial buildings in New York and Washington — which, we’re told, have been cased by al-Qaida — apparently came from an al-Qaida communications operative captured by Pakistan in mid-July. If you read this New York Times report on him, you’ll learn that the casing of buildings started even before 9/11. Maybe these were al-Qaida’s alternate plans for the 9/11 attack itself. Maybe they were considering a follow-up. Maybe the plans were shelved, maybe they weren’t. As far as we know, the new information is specific about location but tells us nothing about timing. Which is why the timing of the current warning — aimed for maximum damping of any post-convention Democratic bounce — smells so fishy.
Perhaps the Bush administration knows more than we do. But between its weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle and its record of timing bogus scares for maximum politial gain, this gang is no longer in a position to say, “trust us.”
Johnson’s argument, which the Times report corroborates, is that the Bush administration’s warning is a cover-your-ass exercise that does nothing to make us safer but that does help reveal to al-Qaida exactly what our defense preparations look like. Oh, and of course it also helps Bush politically by underscoring his message that Americans need to be very, very afraid and only he can protect us.
Bush, Cheney and Ridge have set up themselves and the nation they are supposed to be protecting in a classic boy-who-cried-wolf situation. Unfortunately, as Johnson observed, there really is a wolf out there, and he’s probably quite amused and delighted by all the Bush administration’s self-serving alarms.
At a time when more than anything else we need to be able to trust our government, our government has tossed that trust away for a mess of political pottage. Beyond his economy-choking, job-limiting economic policies and his deceptively justified, incompetently executed “war of choice” in Iraq, President Bush has lost credibility in the most basic realm of defense against another 9/11. Which is why throwing this administration out on its ears is a necessary prerequisite to restoring Americans’ safety. A government whose word we doubt is a government that can’t protect us.
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