- Intelligence pros say the White House is manufacturing
terrorist alerts to keep the issue alive in the minds of voters and to
keep President Bush's approval ratings high, <http://www.capitolhillblue.com/>Capitol
Hill Blue reports.
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- The Thursday report said that the administration is engaging
in "hysterics" in issuing numerous terror alerts that have little
to no basis in fact.
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- "Unfortunately, we haven't made a lot of progress
against al-Qaida or the war on terrorism," one FBI agent familiar
with terrorism operations told CHB. "We've been spinning our wheels
for several weeks now."
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- Other sources within the bureau and the Central Intelligence
Agency said the administration is pressuring intelligence agencies to develop
"something, anything" to support an array of non-specific terrorism
alerts issued by the White House and the Department of Homeland Security.
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- "Most of the time, we have little to go on, only
unconfirmed snippets of information," a second FBI agent, who also
was not named in the report, said. "Most alerts are issued without
any concrete data to back up the assumptions."
-
- Indeed, the most recent terrorism alerts have been issued
absent specific threat information. Each of the accompanying warnings comes
without any shift in the nation's new color-coded alert system; <http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/03/20020312-5.html>the
current warning level of yellow, or "elevated," has been in place
since late September.
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- Even recent reports regarding five Arab men who may have
slipped into the country via Canada using phony identification could be
politically motivated, one expert said.
-
- "We have very, very little to support the notion
that these five represent any more of a threat than any of the other thousands
of people who enter this nation every day," terrorism expert Ronald
Blackstone said. "It's a fishing expedition."
-
- On Wednesday, one of the five, a Pakistani jeweler, Mohammed
Asghar, was tracked down in Pakistan by The Associated Press. He told reporters
there he'd never been to the U.S., though he said he tried once ö
two months ago ö to use false documents to get into Britain to find
work.
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- "I imagine the finger pointing has started at the
White House," Blackstone said.
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- On Thursday, President Bush said of the Asghar case:
"We need to follow up on forged passports and people trying to come
into our country illegally."
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- "Don't misunderstand, there is a real terrorist
threat to this country," another FBI agent told CHB. But, the agent
continued, "every time we go public with one of these phony 'heightened
state of alerts,' it just numbs the public against the day when we have
another real alert."
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- Last year, the FBI issued alerts that terrorists may
attack stadiums, nuclear power plants, shopping centers, synagogues, apartment
houses, subways, and the Liberty Bell, the Brooklyn Bridge and other New
York City landmarks, reported Knight-Ridder newspapers. The bureau also
advised Americans to be wary of small airplanes, fuel tankers and scuba
divers.
-
- CHB reported that FBI and CIA sources said a recent White
House memo listing the war on terrorism as a definitive political advantage
and fund-raising tool is just one of many documents discussing how to best
utilize the terrorist threat.
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- "Of course the White House is going to exploit the
terrorism threat to the fullest political advantage," said Democratic
strategist Russ Barksdale. "They would be fools not to. We'd do the
same thing."
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- The White House did not return phone calls from WorldNetDaily
seeking comment.
-
- Knight-Ridder Newspapers, meanwhile, reported the FBI
has never meant for all its warnings and advisories to be made public.
-
- "Everything is being described as a terror alert,
and that's not what this stuff is," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman
for the Department of Homeland Security, in a July interview.
-
- But, he added, "if information is becoming public,
then we naturally cannot work in a vacuum and pretend like all this information
is not becoming public."
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- "We live in a world of threats; not all of them
necessitate a warning," says FBI terrorist warning chief Kevin Giblin,
a 27-year veteran of the bureau. He told Knight-Ridder there should be
a generally increased level of vigilance, and he looks to the color-coded
advisory system ö not the alerts intended for police ö to signal
it.
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- The threat of terrorism may also be helping the White
House manage the sagging economy. Officials at home finance giant Freddie
Mac said yesterday that the threat of terrorism may have played a role
in bringing 30-year mortgage rates down to 5.85 percent, their lowest since
an average 5.83 percent in 1965.
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- "Current issues such as the possibility of military
actions abroad, heightened terrorism alerts and an unexpected drop in consumer
confidence contributed to the decline in mortgage rates this week,"
Frank Nothaft, Freddie Mac chief economist, told Reuters.
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