by Gene Lyons

Aug. 27, 2009 | So yet another Bush administration Cabinet-level official has petitioned to get his conscience and reputation back. This time, it’s Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security. The one-time Pennsylvania governor admits in a new book that he felt political pressure from the White House to issue bogus terror alerts before the 2004 presidential election.

Big surprise, right? By 2004, anybody who didn’t grasp that crying wolf was the Bush/Cheney administration’s basic game plan was probably also astonished last January when the “Texas cowboy” who’s never been seen on a horse chose a Dallas mansion over his beloved ranch. Golly, who’s doing all that brush-cutting?

Indeed, the most fascinating aspect of the Ridge revelations has been a flame war that’s broken out between establishment Washington pundits and less-reverent bloggers. The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder started it by observing in smug inside-the-Beltway fashion that he and like-minded colleagues were actually right to be wrong about fake terror warnings.

People who smelled a rat, see, “based their assumption on gut hatred for President Bush, and not on any evaluation of the raw intelligence.” Whereas, sober-sided thinkers like him credited the Bush administration’s good intentions.

Confronted with ample contemporaneous evidence of Bush administration flimflams by Salon’s Glenn Greenwald and the scholarly Marcy Wheeler of Firedoglake.com, Ambinder apologized for the “gut hatred” part. But he alibied: “Information asymmetry is always going to exist, and, living as we do in a democratic system, most journalists are going to give the government the benefit of some doubt, even having learned lessons about giving the government that benefit.”

Yeah, sure. Purely with regard to terrorism and national security, by 2004, Bush/Cheney had already gotten caught deceiving the public about having “no warning” before the 9/11 attacks, not to mention about Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent weapons of mass destruction. If skepticism was still inappropriate, would it ever be warranted?

Yet people who found the timing of terror alerts suspect, such as then-Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean, were dismissed as crackpots.

It was much the same after former Secretary of State Colin Powell confessed misgivings about his 2003 U.N. speech that stampeded the United States into an ill-advised war in Iraq. How could any serious American journalist possibly have seen that coming? Or, as your humble, obedient servant here wrote at the time, “War fever, catch it.”

This column summarized “mainstream” opinion on Feb. 12, 2003: “The allegedly ‘liberal’ Washington Post responded editorially with a one-word headline, ‘Irrefutable.’ Columnist Mary McGrory announced that despite being almost a pacifist … ‘I’m Persuaded,’ mostly by what she described as Powell’s unimpeachable integrity. Joining the stampede was New York Times columnist Bill Keller, who noted that ‘The I-Can’t-Believe-I’m-a-Hawk Club includes op-ed regulars at this newspaper and the Washington Post, the editors of the New Yorker, the New Republic and Slate, columnists in Time and Newsweek.”

And yet it was all rubbish, exactly as some of us raised on intelligence hoaxes suspected. Evidence of what I called “chicanery and fraud” in the U.S. case against Iraq was obvious to anybody unafraid to see it.

But here’s the big thing about “mainstream” journalism and what Ambinder calls “information asymmetry.” Upton Sinclair said it best: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

Furthermore, the safest place during a stampede is the middle of the herd. Establishment journalists with mortgages, car payments and children in private schools saw what happened to the Dixie Chicks. Why couldn’t it happen to them? (The job I got fired from that month wasn’t paying my bills.) The United States had been attacked. Feelings ran high, especially in New York and Washington.

What did it matter if we killed the wrong Arabs, so long as Arabs were being killed? In Thomas Friedman’s immortal words, “We hit Iraq because we could. That’s the real truth.”

Under oath to a Senate committee, Condi Rice told a barefaced whopper about the Aug. 6, 2001, CIA terrorism briefing that Bush blew off. Media insiders pretended not to notice. Bush made a slapstick skit of searching under his Oval Office desk for Iraqi WMDs. The press laughed on cue. He claimed that Saddam Hussein forced him to invade Iraq by expelling U.N. arms inspectors. (In reality, Bush made them leave.) Pundits praised his charm.

Long under siege for “liberal bias,” media careerists now find themselves confronted with people they see as passionate amateurs. True, fearless scrappers like my friend Joe Conason have always been around, and somebody like Paul Krugman — a world-class economist who doesn’t care what, say, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews thinks of him — can be very annoying.

But what’s really driving these jokers up the wall is economic and intellectual competition from the Internet: people with first-class minds and a passion for truth that some of them can barely remember.

© 2009 Gene Lyons. Distributed by Newspaper Enterprise Association

by Rachel Weiner

Former Bush administration officials are vehemently denying Ridge’s statements.

“We went over backwards repeatedly and with great discipline to make sure politics did not influence any national security and homeland security decisions,” former White House chief of staff Andy Card told Politico. “The clear instructions were to make sure politics never influenced anything.”

“Under no circumstance was Tom Ridge or anyone else directed to change the threat level,” former homeland security adviser Frances Townsend said. “It didn’t work that way, and it certainly didn’t work that way in 2004. It was always an apolitical process.”

It seems that no other former top Bush political and national security officials were willing to respond.

* * * * *

In a new book, former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge reveals new details on politicization under President Bush, reports US News & World Report’s Paul Bedard. Among other things, Ridge admits that he was pressured to raise the terror alert to help Bush win re-election in 2004.

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was “blindsided” by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush’s re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Dave Weigel, writing for the Washington Independent, notes that in the past, Ridge has denied manipulating security information for political reasons. In 2004, for example, he said, “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security.”

“What Tom Ridge disclosed confirms our worst suspicions,” said Sen. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who criticized the color-coded system back in 2003. “Just like they did in Iraq, the Bush Administration manipulated intelligence to cause fear in the public to further its political goals.”

The Bush administration was forced to admit in the days after the 2004 alert that it was based on intelligence three or four years old. Officials then claimed there was a previously unmentioned “separate stream of intelligence” that justified the warning — but offered little tangible information to support their new story..

ThinkProgress recalls, the AP reported that “even ‘some senior Republicans’ privately questioned Ridge’s timing of a terror alert that came just three days after the Democratic National Convention.”

Ridge’s book, “The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege…and How We Can Be Safe Again,” comes out September 1.

by Joe Schembrie, LewRockwell.com

Given the recent worldwide furor over election irregularities in Iran, here’s some advice for Iran’s rulers on how America’s rulers successfully avoid such public relations disasters. Since even official US government statistics admit that the ratio of Public Debt to GDP for America is 60% compared to only 25% for Iran, America’s banksters clearly have much to teach Iran’s mullahs in how to exploit and impoverish their people for generations to come without fomenting a revolution in retaliation. The secret, obviously, is to maintain the form of democracy without the substance.

First and foremost, in American elections, the presidential candidates of the major parties are hand-picked by the financial elite that runs the country, so that the new “reform” President follows the same policies as the previous “traditionalist” President. By this pretense of choice in candidates, our rulers can appear to conform to the popular will without having to compromise their agenda.

The Iranian democratic experience shows that paper ballots can be efficiently counted by hand in mere hours, but in America we use complicated ballot counting machines which often malfunction and confuse election results for weeks on end, until finally the Supreme Court flips a coin. This heightened sense of drama is useful because it creates the emotional impression in the public mind that it really makes a difference as to who recites from the presidential teleprompter.

In the name of election reform, America is now transitioning to voting computers that produce no paper trailwhatsoever. In a world that made sense, such complete lack of accountability would trigger universal accusations of intent to rig elections, but the fraudulence of the candidates cancels out the fraudulence of the voting machines and so there really isn’t much to complain about.

If despite the sanitization of election results our sleepy citizenry should wake up and decide to publicly protest, they will be confined to cramped holding pens known as “Free Speech Zones,” where they are protected from the danger of being noticed.

What if protest crowds in America burst out of confinement onto the streets and become unruly? Then the police are authorized to use tasers, which can be just as lethal as guns but are officially declared “non-lethal,” which means that if you are harmed by excessive shock it’s never the cop’s fault and you must have really been asking for it. Since tasers are bloodless, they provide little opportunity for martyrdom photo-ops.

Speaking of media, American government is far ahead of Iran in terms of filtering the news. In America, the police routinely confiscate the cameras and cell phones of bystanders in the vicinity of an act of police brutality. This is technically illegal, but any show of resistance will bring charges of “‘interference” with police business.

As for Twitter, the phone companies (guess who controls them) will happily comply with government “requests” to monitor personal phone communications so that Homeland Security can take appropriate action against troublemakers. Such surveillance is illegal, but that simply means the government issues amnesty and promises not to break the law again unless it feels like it.

I don’t know the status of civil rights in Iran, but here in America the regime creates a disincentive for anti-government protests by infringing upon certain minor constitutional rights, such as the right not to be tortured into making false confessions. That the Iranian regime recently released a foreign journalist whom it accused of being a spy – rather than waterboarding her until she confessed to being a spy – indicates that Iran has a long way to go before its human rights record matches that of the United States.

These examples are just a brief summary of some of the many techniques that our ruling elite employs here in America to maintain the illusion of democracy while blatantly operating the biggest empire the world has ever seen. To be sure, the recent protests in the streets of Tehran are a distraction, but in keeping with the lessons of modern American democracy, there’s nothing wrong with Iranian democracy that a shipload of tasers and waterboards can’t fix. With a little hard work and a lot of hypocrisy, the mullahs can make over Iran’s democracy into just as much an admired sham as is America’s.

Of course, the Iranians will still have to exchange their increasingly valuable oil for our increasingly worthless dollars, or our government will find an excuse to bomb them back to the stone age no matter what they do. Admittedly, that’s not much of a choice, but you hardly need Dick Cheney to tell you that if democracy could actually affect government policy, it would be un-American.