Reading is fundamental, NRO edition
August 21st, 2009Here’s K-Lo questioning Tom Ridge’s claimed concern over discussions about raising the terror threat level a few days before the Presidential election in November 2004:
I wasn’t in the room. But how can someone whose title is director of homeland security not resign if he believes the security of the homeland is being compromised in some way by the White House? How do you wait all these years before saying something?
Here’s the second paragraph of the NY Times article that she links in her post:
After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.
He resigned three weeks later. I don’t know what to say. As far as not making this public before now, there are two obvious reasons. First, it would have completely undermined the public’s trust of Bush on national security; Ridge could be very concerned about this but unwilling to cause havoc. More cynically, he filed it away under “memoirs” to have something to use in the press releases for his book. My guess is that he was actually quite torn about including this information in the book … normally these sort of gotcha tidbits in memoirs are promoted several weeks ahead of publication to generate interest and orders for books. It looks like Ridge only agreed at the last minute to publish this, so we’re finding out about it less than two weeks before the book hits the street.