Terror and Lies

May 27, 2004

Crusader-in-Chief John Ashcroft seized control of George Bush’s re-election effort yesterday. Hoping that faked-up warnings of an imminent terror attack by Al Qaeda would rally support in Bush’s imploding polls, Ashcroft cited “credible intelligence from multiple sources” to warn that Al Qaeda was planning “to hit the United States hard” this summer.

Just in case we didn’t get the point, a Bush administration official quoted in the pro-Bush Washington Times , the Moonie News, said that the coming attack might even involve weapons of mass destruction. “A WMD attack remains on the table for the bad guys. Although Osama bin Laden has not used these attack modes yet, clearly he is interested in them.”

Really? Would those be the same “sources” who said that Iraq was an imminent threat? And that Iraq supported Al Qaeda? (False and false, of course.) The Washington Times announced all this in a screaming headline with photos of seven supposed terrorists—somehow omitting that lawyer in Oregon, who is now collecting FBI apologies—but it received enormous coverage in sane newspapers, too.

Well God bless The New York Times. Ashcroft’s baloney appeared nowhere on page one.  Instead, it was relegated to page A14, in an article whose headline said: “Some Question the Threat and Its Timing .” Wow. Here’s an excerpt:

There's no real new intelligence here, and a lot of this has been out there already,” said one administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity. “There is really no significant change that would require us to change the alert level of the country.

The names of six of the seven were publicly circulated by the authorities months ago, and officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said that they had no reason to believe that any of the suspects were in the United States.

Some intelligence officials said they were uncertain that the link between the fresh intelligence and the likelihood of another attack was as apparent as Mr. Ashcroft made it out to be.

Harold Schaitberger, head of the International Association of Firefighters, told reporters in a conference call organized by Mr. Kerry’s campaign that he found the timing of the announcement to be “politically convenient at best” because it came after “we see the president’s approval ratings plummet.”