The Loveshade Family Blog

Tom Ridge, America's former Homeland Security Secretary, now writes that he was pressured by members of George W. Bush's Cabinet to raise the terrorist alert level--right before the 2004 presidential election.

In a new book, Homeland Security's first secretary claims this pressure came from then Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and then Attorney General John Ashcroft.

Ridge said this was a significant factor in his leaving the White House very shortly after the November 2004 election. Predictably, Bush's popularity raised significantly after the alert. Fearful people are resistant to change--it's part of a survival instinct. Right now, you're alive. If something changes, you may be dead. It's not always rational, but it's there. An external threat is one of the best things an incumbent president can hope for when election times comes around.

We've been saying since it began that publicly raising the alert levels made no strategic sense. The level was at yellow or orange almost continually, never to the safer blue or safest green and rarely to the most dangerous red. And when it was raised, the goverment told people, "It's more dangerous now, but go ahead and do everything normally." An intelligence agency that feels it needs to be on alert doesn't publicize it unless they want the public to do something different than usual.

To us, the entire publicly-announcing-the-alert-level seemed little more than a political ploy. Of course there are those who claim Ridge is wrong.

If you live in America, please ask yourself--right now, do you know what the alert level is? Most of us have rationally stopped paying attention.

See more at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32501273/ns/us_news-security.

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