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Crying wolf in a crowded subway: Reposted from Oct. 7, 2005

Blogger's note: Last week I referred to a blog post that I wrote in October 2005 about the Bush administration using terror alerts to political ends. This notion - scoffed at by many back in the day -- has now been endorsed by Bush's own former Homeland Security Secretary, Tom Ridge. Thanks to some great detective work by reader montani semper liberi, you can read it yourself and see why crazy liberal ideas sometimes prove to be not so crazy after all. Here's the post from 10/7/05:

NYC BLOWN UP FOR PAYING TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO ROVE, MIERS

1. Dec. 21, 2003

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "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?' "...

CIA analysts mistakenly thought they'd discovered a mother lode of secret al-Qaida messages. They thought they had found secret messages on Al-Jazeera, the Arabic-language television news channel, hidden in the moving text at the bottom of the screen, known as the "crawl," where news headlines are summarized.

2. April 2, 2004

3. Aug. 2, 2004.

For the sake of three year old intelligence, the Bush administration had helped blow the first inside double agent the Pakistanis and the British had ever developed. The British had been preparing a set of indictments and pursuing the investigation, in part by using Khan. They were forced to move before they were ready. Some suspects escaped on hearing Naeem Noor Khan's in the media. Of those who were arrested, several had to be released for lack of evidence against them.