Need some help with Homeland Security.

[sofa king]

Hi folks. I just saw that hilarious fear-mongering Bush ad and I would sort of like to create a response to it.

What I would like to do is find some good sources to show that George Bush and Tom Ridge have been monkeying with the Terra-O-Meter for political gain.

The problem is that they've done it so much that I can't get my details straight. So can someone help me to put together citations? Here's what I think I know:

In late July/early August, 2004, the Terra-O-Meter crawled into the orange on "specific information." That specific information later turned out to pre-date the September 11 attacks.

Former CIA Director William Webster got real close to saying that the Bush-bots were trying to avoid "crying wolf." See where I'm going with this?

cite: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37911-2004Aug3.html

There was another "High" spike on the Terror-O-Meter somewhere close to the 2002 mid-term elections. Later, someone in the Administration admitted in print that the warning was in fact a test of the system.

Unfortunately I can't find a citation for that, and I can't use it unless I find it.

I suspect that there were other manipulations of the system as well.

Anyway, anything you folks can recall would greatly help me in gathering the information myself. Even better, if someone thinks it's worthy of using for real, by all means take the idea and run with it. Thanks for your help.

[Parche]

1. terra

Anthrax incidents right before the Patriot act, and only against
Democrats

Terra alert the day after the Democratic convention

[evilqueen]

2. There is already a graphic online with all that data.

I never bookmarked the link, though.

In late July/early August, 2004, the Terra-O-Meter crawled into the orange on "specific information." That specific information later turned out to pre-date the September 11 attacks.

Hmm... I believe this was in response to someone in the WH outing our al qaeda mole (they blamed it, at first, on Pakistan, but that isn't true & Condi Rice even spoke about this at one point, though I don't have the link handy)... the mole was a "computer expert" who had been helping us up to that point in ferreting out al qeada operatives. Last name was Khan.

Why they up'd the alert at that point is related, I think, to the uncovering of this mole's name in the press "on background", as Condi said then.

[sofa king]

3. Oh, hell with it. I'm much better at ridicule.

So I made this instead:

[sofa king]

4. And damned if I didn't misspell "dangerous."