Fabricating Terror

Fabricating Terror
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 04 August 2004

Let me get this straight.

Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge came barnstorming out on
Sunday with a blizzard of warnings about looming terror attacks
against targets in New York, New Jersey and Washington DC. Our nifty
color-coded alert system was raised to Orange, or High. Headlines from
coast to coast blared the bad news, and the stock market began Monday
by giving itself a sound beating.

Late Monday night, however, had articles popping up on the
Washington Post and the New York Times. This was the Post's midnight
take: "Most of the al-Qaeda surveillance of five financial
institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted
before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and authorities are not sure
whether the casing of the buildings has continued, numerous
intelligence and law enforcement officials said yesterday...'There is
nothing right now that we're hearing that is new,' said one senior law
enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. 'Why did we go to
this level? I still don't know that.'"

The data was three years old.

Tom Ridge, in his Sunday remarks, said, "President Bush has told
you, and I have reiterated the promise, that when we have specific
credible information, that we will share it. Now this afternoon, we do
have new and unusually specific information about where al-Qaeda would
like to attack."

The data was three years old.

"The quality of this intelligence," said Ridge on Sunday, "based
on multiple reporting streams in multiple locations, is rarely seen
and it is alarming in both the amount and specificity of the
information."

The data was three years old.

"As of now," said Ridge on Sunday, "this is what we know: reports
indicate that al-Qaeda 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 data was three years old.

"I certainly realize that this is sobering news," said Ridge on
Sunday, "not just about the intent of our enemies, but of their
specific plans and a glimpse into their methods."

The data was three years old.

"But we must understand," said Ridge on Sunday, "that the kind of
information available to us today is the result of the President's
leadership in the war against terror."

The data was three years old.

Furthermore, according to the Washington Post, "Several officials
also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist
operatives about the buildings in Washington, New York and Newark was
obtained through the Internet or other 'open sources' available to the
general public, including some floor plans." The data was three years
old, gathered on the Internet, and delivered to the American people in
tones of doom, as if the hammer were about to fall at any moment.

As reported on the Bloomberg newswire, Laura Bush and the
daughters Barbara and Jenna Bush held a photo-op at the Citigroup
Center in New York City on Monday, the first day of Ridge's new Orange
alert. This was one of the target buildings, according to Ridge.
George W. Bush sent his entire family to the very place that was
supposedly about to be blown to smithereens?

I don't think so.

George W. Bush and his administration officials are using
terrorism - the fear of it, the fight against it - to manipulate
domestic American politics. They are, as they have every day for
almost three years now, using September 11 against their own people.
They are also getting stumblingly obvious about it. We are being lied
to, clumsily, again.

Do you doubt it? Recall, if you will, the report in July by John
Judis, Spencer Ackerman, and Massoud Ansari of the New Republic titled
'July Surprise'. The report read, "This spring, the administration
significantly increased its pressure on Pakistan to kill or capture
Osama bin Laden, his deputy, Ayman Al Zawahiri, or the Taliban's
Mullah Mohammed Omar, all of whom are believed to be hiding in the
lawless tribal areas of Pakistan. A succession of high-level American
officials--from outgoing CIA Director George Tenet to Secretary of
State Colin Powell to Assistant Secretary of State Christina Rocca to
State Department counterterrorism chief Cofer Black to a top CIA South
Asia official--have visited Pakistan in recent months to urge General
Pervez Musharraf's government to do more in the war on terrorism."

The kicker appears in the next paragraph: "A third source, an
official who works under ISI's director, Lieutenant General Ehsan
ul-Haq, informed TNR that the Pakistanis 'have been told at every
level that apprehension or killing of HVTs (High Value Targets) before
[the] election is [an] absolute must.' What's more, this source claims
that Bush administration officials have told their Pakistani
counterparts they have a date in mind for announcing this achievement:
'The last ten days of July deadline has been given repeatedly by
visitors to Islamabad and during [ul-Haq's] meetings in
Washington.'... 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."

On the Thursday of the Democratic convention in Boston, the day
John Kerry was to accept the nomination and deliver the central speech
of the week, Pakistan announced the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani,
a Tanzanian Al Qaeda operative wanted in connection with the 1998
bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Pakistan, it seems,
got the message from Tenet, Powell, Rocca, Black and the Bush
administration itself.

They delivered the terrorist exactly on cue.

In that instance, clearly Bush's people wanted to use terrorism to
deflect attention from the Democratic convention. What were they
trying to distract us from with this Sunday warning nonsense?

It is possible they are looking to dissuade some of the 500,000
protesters, who are planning to surround the Republican convention in
New York at the end of the month, from making the trip. Yet that seems
unlikely; the convention is three weeks away, so it is a bit early to
start scaring people. More likely, they are looking to distract from
the poll-numbers bump Kerry and Edwards are enjoying in the aftermath
of a highly successful convention. Could it be as simple and craven as
that?
Absolutely yes, it could.

Perhaps more interesting is the manner in which this fraud was
exposed. Ridge made the announcement on Sunday, and within 24 hours, a
whole crowd of 'officials' roared out to expose the dated nature of
the information. In other words, the long-abused intelligence
community saw the Bush administration jerking the terror alert system
around, and threw a few torpedoes into their side.

That Bush and his people are using terror to manipulate the
American people isn't the worst part of this, hard as that may be to
believe. The worst part of this is that September 11 happened, that
warnings of a potential attack are necessary to the public safety when
merited, and that every time Bush uses these warnings to assist his
election campaign, the people tune out the warnings even further. This
may well get a lot of people killed someday. When you cry wolf long
enough, people will ignore you when the wolf actually comes to the
door.

What's next?

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international
bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want
You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

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