Ridge alleges pressure on terror alert
The ex-Homeland Security chief says Bush officials pressed him before the '04 election. Another Bush aide denied the charge.
WASHINGTON - Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says in a book that he was pressured by other members of President George W. Bush's cabinet to raise the nation's terror-alert level just before the 2004 presidential election, which Bush won.
Ridge says he objected despite the urgings of Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, according to a publicity release from Ridge's publisher.
In the end, the alert level was not changed. Ridge said the episode persuaded him to follow through with his plan to leave the administration. He quit Nov. 30, 2004.
Ridge, a former Republican congressman and governor of Pennsylvania, was widely seen as a potential running mate to presidential candidate John McCain in 2008 before the GOP nominee chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.
Publicist Joe Rinaldi said Ridge was out of town and not doing interviews until his book, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege . . . and How We Can Be Safe Again, is released Sept. 1.
Bush's former homeland security adviser, Frances Townsend, responded yesterday that politics did not play a role in determining alert levels.
She said two tapes were released by al-Qaeda in the weeks leading up to the election - one by terrorist leader Osama bin Laden and the other by a man calling himself "Azzam the American." Terrorism experts suspected "Azzam the American" was Adam Gadahn, a 26-year-old Californian sought by the FBI.
Townsend said the videotapes contained "very graphic" and "threatening" messages.
She said that any time there was a discussion of changing the alert level, she first spoke with Ridge and then, if necessary, called a meeting of the homeland security council, comprising the secretaries of defense and homeland security, the attorney general, and CIA and FBI directors.
The group then recommended to the president whether the color-coded threat level should be raised.
"Never were politics ever discussed in this context in my presence," Townsend said.
Asked if there was any reason for Ridge to have felt pressured, Townsend said: "He was certainly not pressured. And, by the way, he didn't object when it was raised and he certainly didn't object when it wasn't raised."
In 2005, months after he resigned, Ridge said his agency had been the most reluctant to raise the alert level.
"There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' " he said during a panel discussion in May 2005. But his book appears to be the first time he publicly attributes some of the pressure to politics.
The Homeland Security Department, which Ridge was the first to lead, faced criticism in 2004 from Democrats who alleged that raising the alert level was designed to boost support for the Bush administration during an election year.