Bush aide: Tom Ridge?s terror alert allegation ?wussy?
Former Bush White House communications director Nicolle Wallace believes that Tom Ridge is ?a good and decent man.?
She also thinks he?s kind of a wuss.
Speaking to a panel on Fox News Sunday, Wallace responded to an allegation by the former Homeland Security secretary that Bush administration officials pressured him to [1] manipulate the color-coded terrorism alert system to boost the president?s political fortunes on the eve of the 2004 election.
After an internal debate, the administration did not raise the alert on that particular evening.
?2004 was very much an election about who could best protect us from another terrorist attack,? said Wallace. ?But that is quite different from what he very ? I think, in kind of a wussy way ? alleges. This is not a very precise attack. He pondered and wondered if perhaps politics played into it. It?s very fishy to me.?
Ridge?s claims are set to be published in his forthcoming memoir.
Suspicions that politics played a role in the Bush Administration?s terror alert warning isn?t new.
?The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous color-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials,? liberal blogger Josh Marshall [2] wrote in 2006.
?Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself,? Marshall continued. ?Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge?s terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.?
?If there was pressure, if you do manipulate an agency of government, it is a criminal offense,? John Dean, President Richard Nixon?s former lawyer, [3] told Hardball host Keith Olbermann on Friday. ?This is one of the things that caught a lot of people in Watergate. It?s a conspiracy to defraud the government under title 18 USC 371, one as I say, a lot of people learned painfully? If you try to have a department do something that it?s not supposed to do and it?s doing it for political reasons, you can go to jail for that.
Speaking to MSNBC?s liberal host Rachel Maddow on Thursday, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff at the Bush state department, said that while Ridge?s allegation ?is a suggestion, of course, that [raising the terror alerts] might have been politics.?
He added: ?I don?t see how anyone, with a brain, could have sat for four or five years in the Bush-Cheney administration and not realize that politics drove a lot of the decision making.?
This video is from Fox?s Fox News Sunday, broadcast Aug. 23, 2009.
[4] Download video via RawReplay.com
This video was broadcast by MSNBC on Thursday, August 20, 2009.
URLs in this post:
[1] manipulate the color-coded terrorism alert system: http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/08/ridge-admits-terror-alerts-raised-election/
[2] wrote in 2006: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/21/politics-never-influenced-anything-regarding-terror-alerts/
[3] told Hardball host Keith Olbermann on Friday: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/21/john-dean-terror-alert-may-be-criminal/
[4] Download video via RawReplay.com: http://216.87.173.33/media/2009/0908/fox_fns_nicole_wallace_wussy_090823a.flv
Former Bush White House communications director Nicolle Wallace believes that Tom Ridge is ?a good and decent man.?
She also thinks he?s kind of a wuss.
Speaking to a panel on Fox News Sunday, Wallace responded to an allegation by the former Homeland Security secretary that Bush administration officials pressured him to [1] manipulate the color-coded terrorism alert system to boost the president?s political fortunes on the eve of the 2004 election.
After an internal debate, the administration did not raise the alert on that particular evening.
?2004 was very much an election about who could best protect us from another terrorist attack,? said Wallace. ?But that is quite different from what he very ? I think, in kind of a wussy way ? alleges. This is not a very precise attack. He pondered and wondered if perhaps politics played into it. It?s very fishy to me.?
Ridge?s claims are set to be published in his forthcoming memoir.
Suspicions that politics played a role in the Bush Administration?s terror alert warning isn?t new.
?The 18 months prior to the 2004 presidential election witnessed a barrage of those ridiculous color-coded terror alerts, quashed-plot headlines and breathless press conferences from Administration officials,? liberal blogger Josh Marshall [2] wrote in 2006.
?Warnings of terror attacks over the Christmas 2003 holidays, warnings over summer terror attacks at the 2004 political conventions, then a whole slew of warnings of terror attacks to disrupt the election itself,? Marshall continued. ?Even the timing of the alerts seemed to fall with odd regularity right on the heels of major political events. One of Department of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge?s terror warnings came two days after John Kerry picked John Edwards as his running mate; another came three days after the end of the Democratic convention.?
?If there was pressure, if you do manipulate an agency of government, it is a criminal offense,? John Dean, President Richard Nixon?s former lawyer, [3] told Hardball host Keith Olbermann on Friday. ?This is one of the things that caught a lot of people in Watergate. It?s a conspiracy to defraud the government under title 18 USC 371, one as I say, a lot of people learned painfully? If you try to have a department do something that it?s not supposed to do and it?s doing it for political reasons, you can go to jail for that.
Speaking to MSNBC?s liberal host Rachel Maddow on Thursday, Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff at the Bush state department, said that while Ridge?s allegation ?is a suggestion, of course, that [raising the terror alerts] might have been politics.?
He added: ?I don?t see how anyone, with a brain, could have sat for four or five years in the Bush-Cheney administration and not realize that politics drove a lot of the decision making.?
This video is from Fox?s Fox News Sunday, broadcast Aug. 23, 2009.
[4] Download video via RawReplay.com
This video was broadcast by MSNBC on Thursday, August 20, 2009.
URLs in this post:
[1] manipulate the color-coded terrorism alert system: http://rawstory.com/blog/2009/08/ridge-admits-terror-alerts-raised-election/
[2] wrote in 2006: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/21/politics-never-influenced-anything-regarding-terror-alerts/
[3] told Hardball host Keith Olbermann on Friday: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/08/21/john-dean-terror-alert-may-be-criminal/
[4] Download video via RawReplay.com: http://216.87.173.33/media/2009/0908/fox_fns_nicole_wallace_wussy_090823a.flv
