The terror alerts are back from hiatus.
You remember this show, right? The plot went something like this: Tom Ridge would come on the teevee and say something to the effect of, "We have received word that Arab jihadists are at this very moment pouring over our borders and are going to kill all of you in your beds. Please prepare for the coming destruction of America by buying copious amounts of duct tape and plastic sheeting. Sit tight. We'll let you know when it's safe to come out. Oh, and the terror alert is now at Orange."
But then we would find out weeks or months later that the terror alert was based on information that was unreliable or out of date leaving us to think, "Hmmm, were they just trying to freak us out?" Short answer: yes.
Today's
NY Times has an article about the recent "terror plots" against the Holland Tunnel and the Sears Tower.
In the two most recent plots, the authorities have simultaneously warned that the suspects were contemplating horrific attacks -- blowing up the Sears Tower in Chicago and setting off a bomb in a tunnel between New York and New Jersey -- but then added that as far as they knew, no one was close to actually making such a strike.
In the Miami case, an F.B.I. official said at a recent hearing that the suspects apparently did not have written information on how to make explosives, details on the layout of the Sears Tower or any known link to a terrorist group.
I'd like to remind everyone that the guys in the Miami case thought they could get al Qaeda uniforms and even gave the FBI informant their shoe sizes. Uniforms. For al Qaeda.
And the suspects in the Holland Tunnel case had never met each other and were planning this attack on an internet chat room. Planning a credible attack on a public chat room. Riiigghht.
So, are these arrests politically motivated?
Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at University of Richmond in Virginia who tracks terrorism cases, said the modest evidence disclosed so far in some recent cases in relation to the ability of the suspects to deliver on their threats has caused him to wonder if politics might be a factor.
"There is some kind of public relations gained by making Americans on the one hand feel concerned that the Sears Tower in Chicago or some tunnel in Manhattan is targeted yet on the other hand feel comforted that the government is on top of it," he said.
The questions posed about some of the terror-related arrests echo doubts raised when Tom Ridge was secretary of homeland security and the Bush administration half a dozen times raised the color-coded alert warning to orange, signaling a high risk of a terrorist attack, leading skeptics to suggest the up-and-down warning levels may have been driven in part by politics.
In 2004, there was much talk that that the terror alert system was being gamed, but at the time I agreed with Greg's assessment:
Aside from the occasional snarky post, I try to shy away from accusations that terror alerts are politically motivated. It isn't because I think the Bushies are 100% sincere when alerting the public about impeding attacks. On the contrary, I think the timing of terror alerts always seems to be...well, convenient, but accusations about the subject are a dead-end politically. The brilliance of this strategy is that we can't prove definitively that Bush and co. are abusing their power, so any speculation turns into a "he said, she said" situation in which we end up being lumped in with the conspiracy theorists.
But that was two years ago and so very much has been clarified in that time. We have since learned that the Bushies have no problem prematurely exposing an al-Qaeda double-agent, outing one of our own for political payback, spying on us and generally have no regard for the law or Constitutional norms. Abuse of power? Nixon would be ashamed.
So hold on to your hats, folks, and fasten those seatbelts tight because Unka Karl has already told us what to expect for this campaign season:
"At the core, we are dealing with two parties that have fundamentally different views on national security," Rove said. "Republicans have a post-9/11 worldview and many Democrats have a pre-9/11 worldview. That doesn't make them unpatriotic -- not at all. But it does make them wrong -- deeply and profoundly and consistently wrong."
Right, the national security gambit. You know, the whole Democrats are weak-kneed cowards who will surrender the country to the Terrorists thing and Republicans are big strong, manly men who will protect you to the death from the Islamofascists as long as they're not on vacation at the time.
If we have learned anything from the Bush years, it is that they will use all the powers of the government to further their own narrow, partisan agenda. Which is to say that we can expect to hear a lot of talk about plots foiled, terrorists captured, and saving Omaha from suicide bombers in the coming months.
Just be sure to take all that with a generous dose of salt and work extra hard to elect your favorite Democrat. We need subpoena power.