Ridge: I Was Pressured to Raise Terror Alert Level Before '04 Election

Ridge: I Was Pressured to Raise Terror Alert Level Before '04 Election
By Olivier Knox | Agence France-Presse

20 August 2009

Washington - Former US homeland security chief Tom Ridge charges in a new book that top aides to then-president George W. Bush pressured him to raise the "terror alert" level to sway the November 2004 US election. Then defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and attorney general John Ashcroft pushed him to elevate the color-coded threat level, but Ridge refused, according to a summary from his publisher, Thomas Dunne Books. "After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge is quoting as writing in "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... And How We Can Be Safe Again."

Some of Bush's critics had repeatedly questioned whether the administration was using warnings of a possible attack to blunt the political damage from the unpopular Iraq war by shifting the debate to the broader "war on terrorism," which had wide popular appeal.

Ridge, a former governor of Pennsylvania, was the first secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security that the US Congress created in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist strikes. He also says that Bush's homeland security adviser at the White House, Fran Townsend, called his department ahead of an August 1, 2004 speech to ask Ridge to include a reference to "defensive measures ... away from home" -- language that he read as being a reference to the Iraq war. In those remarks, Ridge said he was raising the threat alert level for the financial services sector in New York City, northern New Jersey, and Washington DC, and went on to praise Bush's leadership against extremism.

"The reports that have led to this alert are the result of offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies around the world, such as Pakistan," said Ridge. "Such operations and partnerships give us insight into the enemy so we can better target our defensive measures here and away from home," he said at the time. He later publicly acknowledged that much of the information underpinning the new alert was three years old, stoking Bush critics' charges of political manipulation.

The rest: http://www.truthout.org/082009K

The man has not a shred of honor or civic worth.

Ridge didn't and that makes him a very dishonorable, un-American, American.

SIR!!! :hi:

I don't think Rumsfeld or Ashcroft, as wicked as they were, would be calling the shots as to the pressure they would apply to Ridge. They would be following someone else's marching orders regarding the carrying out of political decisions.

I can see Rove having a meeting with the White House rogue's gallery in the months before the '04 election saying "what things can we do to steal another one?"

They all suck.

I guess he figures the statute of limitations has run out on his crimes.

meanwhile us stupid folks on the left knew what was going on at the time.

My mother is a staunch democrat. She was just too naive to think that the terror alerts could be manipulated for political gain and the "alerts" scared her out of her mind every time the level was raised. Truly pathetic, I know, but there were others like her. Ridge and the rest should be in jail.

"Ridge also granted an extensive interview to CNN's Newsnight With Aaron Brown, in which he addressed the charges that the Administration was playing politics, saying, "I regret that there's an inference that this kind of public revelation of information is. . .political. It clearly was not and it never will be."

Ridge denied terror alerts were political...2004

Better late than never.

Duh.

did this in 2004 for political purposes. It clearly had an effect -- even if just a small one -- on the election. Remember right after any significant news regarding Kerry there would be a terror alert? Disgusting.

I believe it was orange . . . but it could have been chartreuse.

in my local paper today. And it was buried on page four. They have always openly leaned to the right anyhow.