NYT Duped Again

Lead story on today's front page: New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert.

So let's review the timeline. About two weeks ago, a low-level Al Qaeda operative is captured in Pakistan by their security forces. Conveniently his identity is not "confirmed" by Pakistani intelligence until the Democratic National Convention is in full swing, just as the Administration had discreetly requested several months ago.

On Sunday, Tom Ridge takes to his podium to announce that as a result of intelligence collected at the time of this capture, he is raising the alert level to Orange in NYC and DC, saying that financial centers there are under direct threat. In case anyone was missing the political connection, he closes his press conference by saying, "We must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the President's leadership in the war against terror."

The Monday papers are full of coverage of the threat, and beefed-up security measures (NYT fronts a picture of military police at the NYSE, in flak jackets and assault rifles), to the detriment of the usual boiler-plate "first days" of the new Kerry-Edwards campaign. However, at the same time, the WSJ is breaking the news that most of the threat information discussed by Ridge was 3 to 4 years old (see Bob's joke). I've got three relatives younger than that.

Tuesday's papers give a large weight to this "stale" aspect of Sunday's threat alert. At this point the most charitable interpretation is that the alert was a bit of judicious ass-covering by the Homeland Security team (What if Al Qaeda had attacked on Monday?). But most people catch a whiff of politics in the air - David Letterman asked Clinton about it on his show last night - and given Tom Ridge's aside on Sunday, one can hardly credit his subsequent claim that "We don't do politics at Homeland Security." The key point here is that Ridge made no reference on Sunday to the moldy nature of most of the intelligence he referred to - in particular, the "casing" reports found on Ghailani's laptop in Pakistan.

Comes the NYT on Wednesday with the story I point to above. Anonymous "Senior Administration officials" are revealing to the NYT reporters that there is "new intelligence" (from "late last week") that bolsters the moldy intelligence, and justifies Sunday's Orange Alert. How convenient for an Administration under attack for propagating false alarms! Unfortunately this intelligence is classified, and its nature is so sensitive that it cannot be revealed, even under cloak of anonymity.

Obviously we are getting a strong feeling of deja vu here. But even if we take the anonymous sources at their word (as the NYT apparently does), what are we to make of this? How exactly does it happen that "new intelligence," gathered only within the last week, bolsters the likelihood of a years-old scenario transpiring within days of our completely serendipitous discovery of it? It utterly defies belief.

That the NYT chose to run this concoction as their lead story today proves that they have learned nothing from the run-up to war with Iraq.