This is what we get for giving BushCo the benefit of the doubt
All day yesterday, on the blogs, the radio, everywhere, I heard people comment that the terror alert yesterday had to be something, since they actually had some kind of information this time and you can never be too careful, etc. We gave them the benefit of the doubt--maybe it really was just a coincidence that this terror alert went out on the first day that most people would really be looking over the news for recaps of the Democratic Convention.
We got pie in our face. There was nothing specific about yesterday that justified raising the terror alert, and much of the much-vaunted information is from before 9/11.
The characterization of the age of the intelligence yesterday cast a new light on Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge's announcement Sunday that the terrorism threat alert for the financial services sectors in the three cities had been raised. Ridge and other officials stressed Sunday the urgency of acting on the newly obtained information, but yesterday a range of officials made clear how dated much of the intelligence was.
Oh well. At least we know one thing--BushCo read over this news report that came out Friday very carefully. You know the one, it said that when people were scared about death, they responded to a very specific kind of message positively.
"That was a person who declared our country to be great and the people in it to be special," Solomon, who worked on the study, said in a telephone interview.
From the Washington Post story:
At a news conference announcing his proposed intelligence reforms, Bush said the alert shows "there's an enemy which hates what we stand for."
And once more from the CNN study on voting psychology:
"A lot of leaders gain their appeal by helping people feel they are heroic, particularly in a fight against evil," Greenberg said in a telephone interview from Hawaii, where he presented the findings to a meeting of the American Psychological Association.
I'm surprised that Bush didn't just say, "These terror alerts show....we are a heroic people....particulalrly in the fight....against evil."
Thanks, Echidne!
posted by Amanda Marcotte at
3.8.04
1 Comments:
This is precisely what's so utterly terrifying about this president and his handlers, fearmongerers all. I've pushed this report up the chain of command in my own newsroom, but whether it will ever go anywhere I don't know. And now we have the Pakistanis (told just a few weeks ago that it would be really nice if they could manage some capture in time to mess with the Dem Convention -- and voila, there's Ghailani, captured on Sunday but unannounced until Thursday, a few hours before Kerry's speech) but there they are today, going on about all this new information they've gotten and how they've gotten some high up al Qaeda members and how there's a plot (oooh ooh) to disrupt the Republican convention, because, as we've all been told, they's askeered of this prez.
Right.
No, here's what it is. The Pakistanis, hoping for some Washingtonian help for their own troubles (not to mention to keep Washington off their backs for letting al Qaeda hang out in the mountains to begin with) are offering up a couple of "catches" who've been in hiding so damned long they have no clue what's going on -- and they're passing them off as "key" members or leaders or whatever.
May it give you some comfort to know that in this newsroom, at least, skepticism about this "terror alert" was at an orange if not red level itself.
8/03/2004
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