New York Times pouring cold water on the Orwell Bush administration's intended pre-election terror scare.
. . . there are also those, especially abroad, who question the information and analyses relied on by Mr. Ridge and other senior Bush administration officials in their repeated public warnings of an election-year terror threat.
"I've seen some analytical pieces from the bureau and the agency," said one senior American counterintelligence official, referring to election threat reports by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency. "On a scale of one to a hundred, I'd give it about a two."
. . . In Europe and the Middle East, senior counterterrorism officials say they have been perplexed and uneasy about the American officials' warnings. They say that last summer they had seen no evidence of an election-year threat in their own intelligence reports.
In interviews, these officials, based in eight countries, including Britain, France, Spain, Germany, Italy and Jordan, said they had not seen a single solid piece of intelligence, like a statement of a Qaeda operative or an intercepted phone conversation, to back up the warnings.
"I am aware of no intelligence, nothing that shows there will be an attack before the U.S. presidential election," said a senior European-based counterterrorism official.
Harsh, no? The NYT article, incidentally, is kind of a me-too followup to the Washington Post's similar story, which had this disturbing snippet:
"We've not unearthed anything that would add any credence to talk of an election-related attack," said one senior FBI counterterrorism official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because authorities have been instructed not to talk publicly about the issue before the elections.
As we all know, Bushite officials were all too happy to "talk publicly about the issue" when they thought there was a legitimate threat. But the possibility that maybe there aren't really wolves waiting to devour us, well, apparently that's a secret that must be kept from the American people.
Thank goodness for the non-political appointees, both here and in Europe, who clearly were offended by Bushits' dishonesty and chose to spill the beans to the Times and the Post. Some people still have consciences, at least. |
