[Infowarrior] - Ridge: DHS pressured to raise terror levels

[Richard Forno]

Ridge Claims That He Was Pressured to Elevate Threat Warning
Updated 7:42 p.m.
By Garance Franke-Ruta

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/08/20/ridge_claims_in_book_that_he_w.html?hpid=news-col-blog

Former Pennsylvania governor Tom Ridge, the first director of the  
Department of Homeland Security, says that he was pressured by other  
agency heads to raise the national security-threat level on the eve of  
the 2004 presidential election -- a move he rejected as having  
political undertones.

The disclosure comes in promotional materials for Ridge's new book,  
due out Sept. 1, in which he writes that Defense Secretary Donald H.  
Rumsfeld and Attorney General John D. Ashcroft tried to pressure him  
to raise the threat level.

"After that episode, I knew I had to follow through with my plans to  
leave the federal government for the private sector," Ridge writes in  
the book, "The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege ... and How We  
Can Be Safe Again," according to publishers Thomas Dunne Books.

He submitted his resignation within the month.

Another official in George W. Bush's administration, White House  
homeland security adviser Frances Fragos Townsend, told the Associated  
Press on Thursday that Ridge "was certainly not pressured," while a  
spokesman for Rumsfeld rejected Ridge's assertion.

"The story line advanced by his publisher seemingly to sell copies of  
the book is nonsense," Keith Urbahn said in a statement. "During the  
fall of 2004, Osama bin Laden and an American member of al-Qaeda  
released videotapes that said in no uncertain terms that al-Qaeda  
intended to launch more attacks against Americans. ... Given those  
facts, it would seem reasonable for senior administration officials to  
discuss the threat level."

Ridge's publicist, Joe Rinaldi, said Thursday that the former  
secretary was not doing interviews.

Ridge will also say in the book that his relationship with Rumsfeld  
had been distant, with the Pentagon chief rarely making himself  
available for meetings with his domestic security counterpart.

And Ridge will also reveal that he was never invited to a White House  
National Security Council meeting -- Condoleezza Rice was NSC director  
during President George W. Bush's first term -- that he was routinely  
"blindsided" by an information-withholding Federal Bureau of  
Investigation during Oval Office briefings, and that his efforts to  
establish regional Homeland Security offices in New Orleans and six  
other major cities in the years before Hurricane Katrina were thwarted  
by bureaucracy.

The man who oversaw America's airport screening was himself singled  
out for screening more than two dozen times, he will say.

Threat-level warnings became a subject of controversy in 2004 after  
one rise was declared just days after the Democratic National  
Convention that summer. The move was seen by some at the time as  
redirecting public attention toward an issue where Bush was stronger  
(terrorism) and away from questions about the war in Iraq being raised  
by challenger Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).

Some of the intelligence behind the alert was ultimately revealed to  
be three to four years old, though newly obtained.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland of Security,"  
Ridge said at the time.