Pacific Views

Another really huge surprise from Dubya's administration.

Less than 24 hours ago, we expressed just a teensy bit of skepticism about the new terror alert in the US. Our instincts seem to have been right, as this first paragraph of a NY Times story on that terror alert shows:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

This use of old information to justify a terror threat sounded rather familiar. A quick web search turned up this item from February, 2003, during the build-up for the Iraq war:

Downing Street was last night plunged into acute international embarrassment after it emerged that large parts of the British government's latest dossier on Iraq - allegedly based on "intelligence material" - were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old.

We suspect that the US government's info on the new terror threat is about as accurate as the UK government's info on the Iraqi threat was.

Via NY Times and UK Guardian.

Posted by Magpie at August 2, 2004 10:07 PM | War on Terrorism | Technorati links |