In the year and a half leading up to the 2004 election, terror alerts were
so frequent that many of us began to regard them as politically motivated scare tactics.
How many have there been since November 2004? Blogger Josh Marshall
at the site (above) thinks there have been none.
I tried Googling for the answer, but to no avail.
It is probably safe to say that it is immoral to sound false alarms nationwide for political gain.
Is it illegal, as well?
For one thing, there are probably unnecessary expenditures associated with bogus terror alerts, such as military/civilian personnel put on alert status, planes scrambled, and so on.
What do you count as a “major” alert? I found a CNN article documenting an orange-level alert as of 7 July 2005.
We’ve certainly been hearing a lot less in the media about terror alert levels in general in 2005 than in 2004. However, the toll of actual terror attacks worldwide in 2005 looks to be at least comparable to what it was in 2004. I don’t know what metric the Department of Homeland Security uses for determining the current threat level or issuing statements about it to the media, so I can only speculate as to whether they’re deliberately manipulating it for political gain.