Have you noticed that whenever W’s administration faces a new scandal, fiasco, or downturn in public opinion a new Terror threat suddenly emerges? Well, I hadn’t made the connection myself, but Keith Olbermann of MSNBC wrote an article entitled The Nexus Of Politics And Terror in which he presents his case:
[Last Thursday on Countdown] I suggested that in the last three years there had been about 13 similar coincidences – a political downturn for the administration, followed by a “terror event” – a change in alert status, an arrest, a warning.
We figured we’d better put that list of coincidences on the public record. We did so this evening on the television program, with ten of these examples. The other three are listed at the end of the main list, out of chronological order.
He does qualify his findings, even calling them “coincidences,” but a quote from former Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge lends some credence to Olbermann’s hypothesis:
More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don’t necessarily put the country on (alert)… there were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said “for that?”
As Olbermann says, “Judge for yourself,” but I for one don’t put anything past this administration.
