Ridge doesn't really seem to think much of it:
Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said Monday people "are hyperventilating" about his assertion that politics played a role in talk of raising the terror alert before the 2004 elections.
"A consensus was reached. We didn't go up. The process worked," Ridge said in an interview on ABC's "Good Morning America."
The former Pennsylvania governor, however, did not take back the statement in his new book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege," that he worried at the time that politics was a consideration in discussions among high-level officials about whether to raise the color-coded terror alert to a higher level. He acknowledged there was a lively debate about it, but repeated that it was not done, and thus not an issue.
To me, it hardly seems odd that 8 months after al Qaeda bombed trains in Madrid to successfully influence the Spanish elections to put a pro-retreat government in power we'd worry our elections might similarly be targetted.
And would it be odd for someone in the administration to note that, like the Spanish government, our government might suffer from the fallout if we failed to take any visible action?
The alert levels were an art--not a science--so it is natural that there would be debate.
I'm still disappointed by Ridge, who may have allowed publicity efforts to sell his book imply far more than he meant.
But move on to the next plastic turkey issue, please.
