[Mb-civic] Suspicious NY Terra Alert

[Mike Blaxill]

>From Salon
http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/index.html?blog=/politics/war_room/2005/10/07/terror/index.html

The New York terror alert: Questions where there
shouldn't be

When we caught a ride with John Kerry last May,
he complained to us about the boy-who-cried-wolf
nature of the Bush administration's terror
warnings. Maybe all those orange alerts had been
justified by intelligence reports, Kerry told us,
but maybe they'd been driven by political
concerns, too. "I just have no way to measure
it," he said. "Instead of feeling absolutely
confident, I have no way of measuring it."

It turned out that Kerry was right to be
concerned. Long after the election was over,
former Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge
acknowledged that the Bush administration had
sometimes raised alert levels based on flimsy
evidence and over his objections.

So what are we to make of yesterday's news of a
heightened alert for the New York subway system?
Maybe the alert is justified by credible
intelligence: Officials say they have received
intelligence that a group of men had hatched a
plan to hide explosives in baby strollers and
briefcases and then set them off in the subway.
Or maybe the alert, or at least the timing of it,
had something to do with changing the subject for
the White House: After all, as Bush's Supreme
Court nominee runs into opposition and his chief
political advisor returns to the grand jury room,
the White House is suddenly talking an awful lot
about the global war on terrorism again.

The answer is, we just don't know. It's the
problem with the boy who cried wolf. We know that
the government has raised the terror alert level
before on what turned out to be false
information. We know that the government had a
hand in manipulating the timing of the news this
time around. We're not saying that there's
anything nefarious going on here. We're just
saying that there's reason to wonder, and there
shouldn't be.

-- Tim Grieve