That doesn’t make sense. Did the Presidential Directive I quoted not apply? It wasn’t Ridge’s decision to make, was it?
I think the disconnect is here: the directive you mention comes from before Homeland Security was a cabinet-level department, and so Cabinet officers (the AG, etc) get to make the call. I suspect that there’s a more recent directive from 2003 onwards that gives the Secretary of Homeland Security the power to set the level.
This finally prompted me to reset my password so I could log in.
You don’t have to be particularly bright to ask “hey guys why’d the terror alert go up?”. Being President it was his business, and sworn duty to the country to know.
Do people of your political affiliation think “faithfully executing the Office of President” means lying through your teeth to the voters deciding if you should keep that office?
Now you tell me. Was Bush an incompetent tool, too unfit for office to even find decent help, or a deceptive lying bastard with the terror alert?
If you pick the lying option, what else was he lying about? Iraq? He certainly lied when he took his oath. If he’s just stupidly incompetent, well that kind says a lot of nasty things about the Republicans who rallied under him, don’t it?
If you subscribe to the theory that Bush is completely incompetent, you also have to believe that Cheney and Carl Rove are his secret puppeteers. Otherwise, it would be farcical to think such a man could tie his own shoes, much less become president.
In that case, it would have been Cheney who asked for the terror level to be elevated, in the same way it was Cheney that did anything Bush was purported to have.
Maybe you should have read the thread before you reset your password.
THE TERROR ALERT DID NOT GO UP!!!
RIDGE REFUSED THE “PUSH”!!!
HE DIDN’T RAISE THE ALERT LEVEL!!!
Hey Tao!
I guess it’s hard to say which incident we’re talking about until the book comes out, but on 8/1/04 (a couple days after the Democratic convention), the level went to Orange for “financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, N.J.” Tom “Mr. Orange” Ridge cited a “confluence of intelligence over the weekend [pointing] to a car or truck bomb” (cite). So, there **was **a suspiciously-timed bump of the terror level in 2004. Whether Ridge refers to that in the book, I of course don’t know.
So who did raise the alert during the 2004 election, right after the democratic convention?
It was raised, do you know that, right? You’re not that disconnected from the facts, correct?
The same Administration who had no problems trying to connect Iraq with Al Quada, then lie to the public about it. After their claims Iraq was “a clear and present danger” were showed to be either grave incompetence or lies.
Stop trying to lick Bush’s ass. It’s making you look like a moron. Have some self respect.
hey yo!
Is this the scenario, then?
Ridge raises the alert level to orange for certain financial institutions, so this is really yellow and a half, or yellow and a quarter: a public bump, but not really an “official” bumb, the national level stays at yellow. panic and anxiety not authorized unless you work somewhere that money is exchanged in some form. Of course, we don’t know exactly what threat was detected, that’s a secret.
The election approaches, and maybe its not as great as it should be. The Axis of Evil, now Iran, North Korea, and ACORN have undermined America’s faith in The Leader, which might lead to a dangerous strategic blunder, i.e., the replacement of crucial leadership personnel at a crticial juncture. What if Kerry were elected and the nation rose up in furous outrage, be a perfect time for an attack, no?
Anyway, he put up with raising to yellow and a half, even though the evidence was flimsy. He was easy, a bit of a slut. But when they asked to him to go to full orange just before the election, they were asking him to step over the line into flat-out whore. He had long ago given up the dinner-and-a-show standard, but still held firm at bus fare home.
That what I’m guessing happened, and now he’d like to polish that up a bit.
You forgot the part about there being a hypothetical change in the Presidential Directive. That’s important to the plot.
Here’s a fantastic review of the matter from Glenn Greenwald:
It includes a link which (although I didn’t check it out yet) is described as a 17 minute piece by Keith Olbermann laying out the correspondence between political events and increases in the terror alert.
Equally of importance is Glenn’s description of how these assertions were and are treated -
For us here, we’re treated to 1a. The pointilistic pendantry of right-wing hacks like Bricker. “Okay, maybe it happened, but was it really, specifically, demonstrably, infallably, with certitude and documentation, Bush who did it? Because otherwise…”
Please check out Greenwald’s discussion on the matter.
I’ll wait for the actual passage to appear before I draw any conclusions - but it doesn’t look good.
Boy, you moonbat liberals certainly do like to get worked up over nothing. From Ridge’s book:
“… It also seemed possible to me and to others around the table that something could be afoot other than simple concern about the country’s safety.” (Emphasis added)
The threat level was never raised. Meanwhile, others at the meeting in question are denying politics played any role. Frances Townsend for one: “Tom Ridge wasn’t the only person in that meeting who suggested that the terror alert shouldn’t be raised. At no time was there any discussion of politics at that meeting. And the president was made a recommendation, a consensus recommendation from the council that he accepted, not to raise the terror alert.”
But Ridge knows he needs to sell more than a few copies of his book.
If we believe that he was pushed to raise the alert because he wrote it in the book, then it seems clear to me we should believe he refused as well, for the same reason. We can hardly accept his word on incidents we wish to believe and call him a liar only when he don’t like what he’s saying.
So if he did raise the alert at some other time, it seems a reasonably safe assumption that he did it based on some kind of evidence.
Now, having seen that Rumsfeld and Ashcroft were willing to play with the alert of political expediency, we could certainly imagine that they would say, amongst each other, “Fucking Ridge won’t play along. So screw him – let’s feed him disinformation so Mr. Boy Scout feels Ok about raising the alert level.”
That may have happened. But surely you’d agree we can’t jump to yes, that DID happen without something more concrete.
…otherwise, maybe we shouldn’t say, “Really, specifically, demonstrably, infalliably, with certitude and documentation, Bush did it!”
That’s not the incident discussed in Ridge’s book.
Or are you taking the position because it happened once (and Ridge refused to raise it) it MUST have happened again, and on that other occasion he did raise it?
It’s virtually certain that ISN’T the incident, because Ridge clearly says that in the end, the alert level was not raised.
Again, I’ll wait until the book comes out. My guess is that elucidator’s scenario is the most likely narrative. The main takeway for me (so far) is, as you agreed earlier, that Rumsfeld and Ashcroft are scum for pushing Ridge, irresepective of whether the order came from Bush/Cheney or whether Ridge caved.
ETA: the 8/1 incident is not the one mentioned in the blurb, but Ridge may discuss it at another point in the book.
Just as a nitpick. Leaders of third world countries often go tieless as a way of distinguishing themselves from western capitalist suits. Try finding a pic of Evo Morales with a tie on. Obviously the comparison is absurd, but so would be comparing Evo Morales and Ahmadinejad who are probably not wearing ties for much the same reason.