I’m not sure what exactly to make of the story in today’s Washington Post about the list that the Bush administration released earlier this month of “foiled” terror plots.
According to the Post:
A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials, who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or "elevated" risk of attack, to orange, or "high" risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.
The president made it "sound like well-hatched plans," said a former CIA official involved in counterterrorism during that period. "I don't think they fall into that category."
Aha! So the Post caught the administration playing politics with national security, right? Using the specter of 9-11 – again – to distract the public from ... pick your crisis: Miers, Plame, the GOP congressional leadership’s troubles.
Well, maybe not:
Counterterrorism experts said they could not explain why some of the U.S. government's bigger successes did not make the list, including the thwarted attack by Richard Reid, who tried to set off explosives in his shoes aboard a transatlantic flight in December 2001, and the capture a year later of Ali Saleh Kahlah Marri, a graduate student at Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., who officials believe had ties to Sept. 11 terrorists."We don't know how they came to the conclusions they came to," said one counterterrorism official, who spoke anonymously for fear of angering the White House. "It's safe to say that most of the [intelligence] community doesn't think it's worth very much."
So if they were playing politics they did an inept job of it, leaving out some of the better cases.
My best guess: The list originally came about because the president bragged in a morning speech that the government had foiled 10 such plots. White House officials initially wouldn’t comment on the list, but at the end of the day issued the list. It sounds like Bush surprised them and they were left with a few hours to pull together a list to fit his speech.
So yeah, it sounds like someone was playing politics after all.