DERRICK Z. JACKSON
Bush shifting terror alarm onto IraqTWO DAYS after President Bush declared Iraq "the central front in the war on terror," Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that major terrorist attacks are possible this summer -- not from Iraq but from operatives of Al Qaeda who are already inside the United States.
"Disturbing evidence indicates Al Qaeda's specific intention to hit the United States hard," Ashcroft said in a news conference on Wednesday. Ashcroft and Mueller could be right. But their presentation reminded the nation how much their boss has lied to the American people. In a news conference of nearly 4,000 words, Iraq did not come up once. Not one of the seven new suspects Ashcroft and Mueller named came from Iraq or has any publicized tie to Iraq. This is the way it has been ever since the Bush administration created its national threat level system in March 2002. On Sept. 10, 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people in the United States, the government raised the threat level from yellow "elevated" to orange "high." Ashcroft said: "Information indicates that Al Qaeda cells have been established in several South Asian countries in order to conduct car bomb and other attacks on US facilities." Yet two days later, Bush went to the United Nations to say: "In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale. In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms. . . . Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger." Bush said nothing about Al Qaeda cells in South Asia. On Feb. 7, 2003, the government again raised the threat level from yellow to orange. Ashcroft said: "Recent reporting indicates an increased likelihood that Al Qaeda may attempt to attack Americans in the United States and/or abroad in or around the end of the Hajj, a Muslim religious period ending mid-February 2003. . . . The recent bombings of a night club in Bali, Indonesia, and of a resort hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrate the continued willingness of Al Qaeda to strike at peaceful innocent civilians." There was no mention of any threat from Iraq. But two days later Bush said, "The issue facing our nation and the world is the extension of the war on terror to places like Iraq." There was no mention in his speech of Bali or Mombasa. On March 17, 2003, the threat went back to orange on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said: "A large volume of reporting across a range of sources, some of which are highly reliable, indicates that Al Qaeda probably would attempt to launch terrorist attacks against US interests claiming they were defending Muslims or the Iraqi people rather than Saddam Hussein's regime." Continued... |
