In my (and a few other Kossacks) continuing efforts to examine the Khan leak, and to encourage full coverage of it so as to get all our questions answered, I stumbled across this novel analysis of the situation:
Wow. No holds barred analysis there. But is it substantive? Well, we're going to take a look at it, but, before I do, I'd like to remind you why this is relevant.
Almost immediately after the Democratic Convention, the latest terror warnings came out. Howard Dean called the Bushies on it, and in the resulting frenzy the Khan arrest, his description, and then his name were released in that order, in efforts to justify the Orange Alert and calm the growing controversy.
In my mind, knowing what I do about politics and unveiling marketing campaigns (as for Iraq), it's hard for me to not to come to suspect that the Orange Alert was timed as part of a larger PR and campaign effort timed for kickoff after the Democratic Convention.
That makes this very relevant to us here at DKos. I'm not going to take this issue lying down until we have all of the outstanding questions answered.
With that in mind, let's keep asking and digging up those questions, and we'll start with this one I just found:
As we reported
here and
here, so-called al-Qaeda "computer expert" Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani, was arrested on 13 July in possession of detailed but rather old surveillance documents related to major financial institutions in New York, Newark, and Washington.
Since that time, other intelligence has led the US security apparatus to imagine that a plot to attack the USA might be in the works. (No doubt there are scores of plots in the works, but we digress.) Therefore, last week, the ever-paranoid Bush Administration decided that Khan's building surveillance documents, and the hints of imminent danger, had to be connected. Indeed, if al Qaeda is to strike at all, it is most likely to strike the targets mentioned in Khan's documents, as opposed to thousands of others, the Bushies reasoned.
And this seems to jive with what happened. Bush's advisor Townsend has contributed most to hysteria about impending attacks on places like the Capitol, but the Capitol Police themselves very soon after dismissed such claims:
Capitol Police Chief Terrance W. Gainer, challenging remarks by a top White House homeland security official, said yesterday that "there is not a specific, credible, direct threat against Congress as an institution, or its members."
Gainer was responding to statements by Frances Fragos Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, who said in a television interview Sunday that the most recent intelligence on threats by al Qaeda included mention of the U.S. Capitol and members of Congress. Townsend said the information was not as detailed as it was for five financial institutions at the heart of the government's Aug. 1 decision to raise the terrorist threat alert for financial sectors in three cities.
Several other law enforcement officials in Washington said yesterday that they were not aware of any such information. Gainer, who has taken a series of aggressive steps to heighten security on Capitol Hill -- including a street closure and the addition of 14 vehicle checkpoints -- maintained, as he did last week, that he has no information indicating a current threat to the area.
So, this isn't just tin hat stuff, and there does seem to be a trail of evidence suggesting an ongoing pattern of exaggeration and fear-mongering by the Bush Administration. Let's return to the article that inspired this diary and see what further we can find there:
But government panic over dubious intelligence was not enough. Another Bush Administration hobby horse is a notion that foreign evildoers intend to disrupt the November elections. We've been hearing about this ever since it was assumed that a terrorist attack determined the Spanish elections back in March.
So it did not take long for Bush security apparatchiks to begin leaking to the press strong hints that this is precisely what's behind the Administration's current terrorist hysteria.
According to an article in the New York Times, Khan the cyberterrorist "was also communicating with al Qaeda operatives who the authorities say are plotting to carry out an attack intended to disrupt the fall elections, a senior intelligence official said Saturday."
Given the amount of skepticism the Administration has had to confront over its most recent Chicken Little act, and its hammerheaded aversion to acknowledging even the tiniest of mistakes, perhaps it was inevitable that the terror hype of last week could only be hyped further. It was impossible to retreat.
We have to wonder if this is true. Once the Bush Administration realized it had foolishly and incompetently outed a suspect we had 'turned' as a double agent for us, as part of its election campaigning and PR campaigns, did it have no other choice but to turn it up all the way, to try and deflect doubts and criticism by themselves not retreating but instead doubling their efforts and promotion of the Khan arrest, along with other big news attention-getting items like announcing arrest warrants for Ahmed Chalabi?
The British seem to think so (though not necessarily with taking their spin as far as I'm playfully taking it here):
Meanwhile, back in Britain, UK Home Secretary David Blunkett - in a rare moment of common sense, if not lucidity - upbraided the Bush Administration for "feed[ing] the news frenzy."
The information on which the Bushies decided to raise the terror alert level is "of dubious worth," Blunkett said, adding that such information should be published "only if it would prove useful in preventing injury and loss of life," which he obviously believes the Bush hysteria would not do.
"There has been column inch after column inch devoted to the fact that in the United States there is often high-profile commentary, followed - as in the most current case - by detailed scrutiny with the potential risk of inviting ridicule," Blunkett said, inelegantly but rightly.
We shouldn't back down on this issue. The Bush Administration have a clear and compelling record of exaggeration and self-serving spin, from justifying the war in Iraq, to describing the success of the occupation in Iraq, to making grand claims of great threats tied together very loosely and dubiously on a paucity of evidence from sources of varying reliability.
Then, the abuse of science, the refusal to acknowledge ecological and climate change dangers and challenges, the seeming obtuseness of not honestly evaluating and perhaps changing their economic strategy, just leads one to wonder about not only the effectiveness of our leadership but also their overall credibility.
And that's why we talk about 'crying wolf', since it's not in a vacuum we say this. They exaggerate everything, not just claims about Khan. I have no reason to give them unbending trust, and so I demand that the answers to our questions about Khan come, openly, and I will not accept attempts to silence me, or my doubts, because of some secret strategy or counter-intelligence operation.
That means the NY Times must come clean too.
I've passed no judgement on the Khan affair as yet, as I'm still seeking the information with which to do so. But I'm not going to sit by idly while the Bush Administration makes wild and unsubstantiated claims in the immediate aftermath of the Democratic Convention in order to hijack the news agenda and put it back on danger and fear.
I just won't. And I hope the rest of you join with me in this cause.