Orange alert: Politicizing national security

The Bush administration played around with color-coded terror alert levels, according to a release from a soon-to-be published book by former Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge. The book, “The Test of Our Times,’’ charges that top advisers to President Bush, including former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and former attorney general John Ashcroft, pressed Ridge to issue a politically motivated alert just days before the 2004 election despite a lack of hard intelligence pointing to a new attack. Ridge and his Homeland Security team pushed back successfully, but the callous calculation to use a terror scare to boost support for the hard-line president prompted Ridge to follow through on his plans to resign. Frances Townsend, Bush’s former homeland security adviser, denied that politics played a role in determining terror alerts. But the Ridge revelation is disturbing evidence that Orange Alert was more a sign that the political security of the Bush administration was at risk than anything else.