Dean deserves an apology
2 + 2 =?
Hey - here;s what Howard Dean said Sunday:
"I am concerned that every time something happens that's not good for President Bush, he plays this trump card, which is terrorism,'' Dean said in an interview with CNN. "It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics, and I suspect there's some of both in it."
On Monday everyone was drumping on him for this and even Kerry was trying to distance himself from the remark.
Now on Tuesday we have this news:
Washington - Much of the intelligence that prompted United States authorities to raise alerts around major financial institutions indicated that al-Qaeda studied the sites as potential targets before the September 11 2001 attacks, The Washington Post said on Tuesday.The newspaper cited anonymous US intelligence and law enforcement officials as saying that most of the information was at least three-years-old and had been obtained through the Internet or other "open sources" available to the public, including some floor plans.
"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level?... I still don't know that."
So what's at work here? Stupidity, Politics? Common sense? Man, it's hard to sort it out, but I know when I heard the reports of this it sounded like alot more than three-year-old information gleaned from the Internet.
Might they be planning to attack these buildings? Sure. But our focus on them could also distract us from other, more likely targets. What would be nice here is if these folks shared exactly what they know instead of us giving us their interepretation of it.
