All Orange, All the Time

No 9/11 Commission is necessary; no Senate Intelligence Committee need be convened. On Sunday of this week, the Bush administration raised the terror alert level from Code Yellow to Code Orange for the sixth time since the system was created in March 2002. It claimed major American and global financial institutions in New York and Washington were in dire danger of attack; announced al-Qaeda arrests in Pakistan; spoke of captured "master" computer geniuses, the chilling discovery of the stored floor plans of the buildings in which those financial institutions are housed, and even counts of how many people passed certain key sidewalk spots in front of them per minute; ensured that New York City's heavily armed "Hercules Teams" would be sent into the streets, a key tunnel closed to commercial traffic, the guard-level on buildings raised precipitously; sent tremors through the nation; turned the TV news and the front pages of every major paper into a series of somber-voiced (or toned) security broadcasts; and loosed "terrorism experts" from think-tanks you never knew existed onto the airwaves to talk about breakthroughs in understanding al-Qaeda "tradecraft" and to debate solemnly whether it was better to release information about impending attacks, thus letting the enemy know you knew they knew you knew, or to keep the same information closer to the vest, lest we give away what we knew they didn't know we knew.

Without an investigative commission or Senate committee to back me up I was instantly preparing to issue a rarely proffered Tomdispatch Guarantee that something was sure to be amiss with this tale of terror in this, my next dispatch. But before I could write it – evidence perhaps that the domestic war on terror has entered the speeded-up realm in which Iraq has long existed ("Vietnam on crack cocaine") – a second (lesser) wave of news made it to the front pages of our imperial papers. By Tuesday, we were informed, as Dan Eggen and Dana Priest of the Washington Post put it on that paper's front page (Pre-9/11 Acts Led to Alerts) that "most of the al Qaeda surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was conducted before the Sept. 11, 2001." They also quoted "senior law enforcement officials" saying things like, "There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new...Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."

Douglas Jehl and David Johnston chimed in the same day on the front-page of the New York Times (Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say) with the same information, adding in paragraph one, "[Intelligence and law enforcement officials] reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terror plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way." The information, all reports now told us, was not only years old, but much of its "masterful" essence may have come from public records or off – gasp – the Internet or other "open sources." A Times editorial that day (Mr. Bush's Wrong Solution) suggested deep in its second paragraph as well as a bit circuitously and in the negative that there might even be a tad of political manipulation involved: "This news does nothing to bolster the confidence Americans need that the administration is not using intelligence for political gain."

The administration responded solemnly that, well, yes, the information was indeed old, but it had been updated recently! Wednesday, in a Glenn Kessler piece, labeled "analysis," in the Post this vital revelation had already been reduced to: "One piece of information on one building, which intelligence officials would not name, appears to have been updated in a computer file as recently as January 2004. But officials could not say whether that data resulted from active surveillance by al Qaeda or came from publicly available information."