As former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge begins his media tour, he is trying to put the rabbit back in the hat, as it were. Here's a representative quotation:
Now, Ridge says he did not mean to suggest he was pressured to raise the threat level, and he is not accusing anyone of trying to boost Bush in the polls. "I was never pressured," Ridge said.
The former secretary and Pennsylvania governor, who now heads a security consulting firm called Ridge Global, also said in the interview that:
Here is what he wrote in the book:
"Ashcroft strongly urged an increase in the threat level, and was supported by Rumsfeld," he writes. "There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None. I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?'"
So is he a liar or a coward? Or both? What do you think, Marc?
Marc, an unbiased journalist, thinks it unseemly to think.
So Ridge says that the AG and SecDef suggested he may want to raise the threat level before the 2004 election but Ridge disagreed. Evidently since he didn’t actually raise the threat level, he must not have felt too “pressured” to raise the threat level.
Frankly I don’t see much here. Given that that we saw other attacks around election time, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to raise the threat level if only to put emergency forces on a higher state of alert as this would seem a logical time for a terrorist attack. I doubt raising the threat level would affect the outcome of an election as the general populace probably doesn’t pay close attention to this sort of thing.
Grade A Wanker.
The color-coded threat levels were basically made for cable news and its short attention span. They had no effect on the average citizen-even those working in big cities, mostly because we were all told to go about our usual business-just is a more freaked out way than before. So they were suspicious even outside of a national election season because it's not clear what they were suppposed to do other than generate a mild panic.
Second, the political effect of the higher threat levels (orange, I think it was?) was to get the president and his national security people on TV for at least a solid week. If people were finally talking about the economy, health-care, or foreigh policy in 2004-guess what changed the conversation quickly? On orange alert.
Lastly, Yes it would be completely unreasonable to tell Americans that because something blew up in some other country before some other election that the same thing was about to happen here. That is called "guess work" And if what you are talking about is the Madrid bombing, I've got bad news for you- Aznar tried to use it to his advantage by falsely blaming ETA. Blindly trusting political figures with something as awful as terrorism is not a good idea.
This should be a national scandal but unfortunately, things of great consequence rarely make their way into the DC chatter.