War Stories: Did Bush have good intentions?
For those hiding in a cave recently, Tom Ridge, the secretary of Homeland Security, warned the nation Sunday of new intelligence — taken from a captured terrorist’s laptop — about Al Qaeda’s preparations to attack five specific targets in three U.S. cities: the New York Stock Exchange and Citibank headquarters in New York City; Prudential Financial in Newark, N.J.; and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund headquarters in Washington, D.C. The documents, he said, were “unusually specific,” down to detailing the easiest ways to enter the buildings and the most damaging place to blow up a bomb.
However, certain things about this report seemed at least ambiguous. Officials noted that Al Qaeda’s surveillance of these buildings had begun before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Did this computer file reflect an ongoing plan or a shard from the archives? On Monday, the first full day of reporting, only The Wall Street Journal pursued this line of inquiry. In the third paragraph of their front-page story, Robert Block and Kara Scannell wrote:
“But since there is no time frame for a possible attack, and since intelligence officials admit they are unsure whether the new information is current or outdated … (the alert) represents a bit of a gamble because it threatens to leave some potential targets more thinly secured than others while flagging for the terrorists those where security has been beefed up.”
By Monday night, the Journal’s skepticism was confirmed. As reported in all major media, the intelligence is three or four years old, and there’s no indication that the attack plan is still active.
A recent New York Times story quotes a “counterterrorism official in Washington” as saying, “We know that Al Qaeda routinely cases targets and then puts the plans on a shelf without doing anything.” The Washington Post quotes a “senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert” as saying, “There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that’s new. Why did we go to this (heightened alert) level? … I still don’t know that.”
Then again, Fran Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on NBC’s “Today” show, “From what we know of Al Qaeda’s methods … they do these years in advance and then update them before they actually launch the attack.”
Still, this leaves open another set of questions. Were steps taken to find out whether these files were really plans and if the plans were really current? Did U.S. intelligence agencies interrogate the laptop’s owner? No doubt. Hence the law enforcement official quoted in the Washington Post as being puzzled that Ridge was making a big deal of this.
If the alert goes up with each discovery, very soon nobody is going to take these alerts at all seriously — including the local law enforcement agencies tasked with enforcing the alerts on already overstretched budgets.
If President Bush is truly serious about preventing terrorist attacks, he has to ensure that these alerts, even when they’re wrong, are at least perceived as sincere and untainted by political motive. By this standard, Ridge, during the terror-alert press conference, proved himself a dreadful Homeland Security secretary when he said: “We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror.”
Most of the media apparently ignored this sentence. But isn’t Ridge’s spin part of the news? Could it be that the spin spurred the news, supplied (at least in part) the rationale for the announcement — especially given the broader context of its timing just a few days after the Democratic Convention?
Assuming the documents are authentic, a case can be made that Bush should have issued the alert, regardless of whether his motives were honorable or cynical. But given the bumpy ride ahead, it would be nice if we could assume they are honorable.
Fred Kaplan writes the “War Stories” column for Slate.