Ridge Cites Pressure Before 2004 Election
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 terrorism 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.
These are the kinds of things that a certain group of people who post here blindly defend, I'll never understand that. It must be an act surely you are not this gullible.
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 publisher Thomas Dunne Books.
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He submitted his resignation within the month.
Obviously the other side cries foul, what would you expect. Who's lying Ridge of those from within the Bush administration watching each others backs?
And Ridge will also reveal that he was never invited to a White House National Security Council meeting -- Condoleezza Rice was NSC director during Bush's first term -- that he was routinely "blindsided" by an information-withholding FBI 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.
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 Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), his reelection challenger
Oh surely not now boys!
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co ... 03993.html
Cole
