I watched the NBC Nightly News tonight, during which a story on the newly Orange Terror Alert Level in New York and Washington was aired. Images of concrete barricades being placed in front of the Stock Exchange while Senator Schumer, Mayor Bloomberg and Governor Pataki reassured everyone that business would go on. In Washington, police armed to the teeth patrol the subways. A "typical" young professional New Yorker expressed his defiance, "I'm not going to live in fear, which is what the terrorists want."
Condi Rice was on the program, ignoring questions and assuring the nation that the only motivation for this announcement and raising of the alert level was the public's well-being.
This of course is all in response to yesterday's announcement that terrorists were targeting and surveilling specific buildings and institutions.
It all sounded a little familiar to me, and now it's clear exactly why: this stuff is three years old.
More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."
The New York Times is a bit more charitable about this revelation, but still includes the following:
Joseph Billy Jr., the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.'s Newark office, said a diagram of the Prudential building had been found in Pakistan. "It appears to be from the period around 9/11,'' Mr. Billy said. "Now we're trying to see whether it goes forward from there.''
Another counterterrorism official in Washington said that it was not yet clear whether the information pointed to a current plot. "We know that Al Qaeda routinely cases targets and then puts the plans on a shelf without doing anything,'' the official said.
The point here is not that these cities or specific buildings are safe -- far from it -- but that the announcement made on Sunday was dishonest and manipulative. In other words, they lied. They then lied about the lie. And they continue to lie. This is not about our physical safety, it's about their political safety.
These stories will hit the print papers in the morning, we'll see what the major TV networks have to say tomorrow evening.
