It seems that the unusually specific terrorist warning issued by the Bush Administration on Sunday was gleaned from mostly old intelligence -- gathered as far back as 2001 and 2000. According to the New York Times, intelligence and law enforcement officials "reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way."
Apparently, Sunday seemed as good a day as any for the Bush team to use this information to scare the bejeezes out of financial services workers in New York, New Jersey and Washington.
More from the Times article:
In a briefing on Sunday, a senior intelligence official said that the threat to the financial institutions "probably continues even today."
Probably.
Federal authorities said on Monday that they had uncovered no evidence that any of the surveillance activities described in the documents was currently under way. They said officials in New Jersey had been mistaken in saying on Sunday that some suspects had been found with blueprints and may have recently practiced "test runs'' aimed at the Prudential building in Newark.Joseph Billy Jr., the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Newark office, said a diagram of the Prudential building had been found in Pakistan. "It appears to be from the period around 9/11,'' Mr. Billy said. "Now we're trying to see whether it goes forward from there.''
Another counterterrorism official in Washington said that it was not yet clear whether the information pointed to a current plot. "We know that Al Qaeda routinely cases targets and then puts the plans on a shelf without doing anything,'' the official said.
So fear begets old suspects with blueprints begets armed guards all over our cities begets a sideways glance at anyone brown, all of which begets ... even more fear!
You gotta wonder if Karl Rove doesn't have sketched out somewhere in his back pocket a timetable for escalated alerts leading up to the election. No doubt the unprecedented red alert is on deck to appear sometime in, say, very early November.
If we continue to live in fear, the terrorists have won. The Bush administration seems intent on making this so. Or at least on keeping us scared enough to think that we must reelect the whole sorry lot in November.
Frankly, we're more scared of the prospect of a second term for Bush than we are of a terrorist attack. Terrorists create fear out of the unknown, but we already know how Bush governs (ineptly at best, malevolently on average, purely evil at worst). Fortunately, we don't have to wonder how we can rid ourselves of this nightmare. All we have to do is vote.
See related Washington Post article here.
UPDATE: Bush officials point to new information (New York Times).
