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Is Bush Hyping the New al-Qaida Threat?God, Chatterbox hopes so.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, May 20, 2002, at 4:59 PM ET

For obvious reasons, this column always takes notice when a high-ranking government official uses the word "chatter." In her May 16 press briefing, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice used the word six times to describe the vague portents of trouble that the Bush administration received prior to Sept. 11. "There was a lot of chatter in the system," Rice said, and President Bush "asked me to go back and to see what was being done about all of the chatter that was there." It turned out there was "much less reporting or chatter at home," leading the administration to think that the terrorism threat was focused on Americans abroad, but it was still "more chatter than usual."

Three days after Rice's press briefing, the New York Times' James Risen and David Johnston broke the terrifying news that American intelligence agencies were once again picking up vague signals that al-Qaida was planning an operation "as big as the Sept. 11 attacks or bigger." The Times piece quoted a "senior administration official" saying, "There's just a lot of chatter in the system again." The next day, Rice was talking up the imminent threat on CNN Late Edition With Wolf Blitzer, ABC's This Week, and CBS's Face the Nation.

The repetition of the phrase "chatter in the system" and the fact that Rice was energetically promoting the notion of an impending attack soon after the Times story broke suggests to Chatterbox that Rice was the Times' "senior administration official." Chatterbox suspects that Rice leaked the al-Qaida-Will-Strike-Again story, or at least lent the Times an unusual level of background assistance, in order to deflect attention from the burgeoning (and slightly unfair) Could-Bush-Have-Prevented-9/11 story. Although it's counterintuitive that the White House would leak a story that it wanted to receive wide dissemination—why not just give it to everyone?—leaking to the Times is a well-known public relations trick. An exclusive gets better Times play—in this case, it was the lead story on Page One—and leaves the rest of the media, which regard the Times as holy writ, racing furiously to catch up. This works even better in the Internet age because now a Times exclusive doesn't have to wait until morning to put competitors in a tizzy. A version of the al-Qaida-Will-Strike-Again story was actually posted on the Times Web site Saturday afternoon prior to appearing in the print edition Sunday.

Chatterbox is not such a cynic that he thinks the Bushies invented this latest al-Qaida threat. It's probably real. But Chatterbox doesn't put it past the Bush White House to time its release of this dire news for maximum political benefit. With the start of a new week, Topic A is shifting away from the Bush administration's possible incompetence in handling the 9/11 threat (mounting evidence suggests that the worst of this occurred within the FBI) and toward the prospect of a new, devastating al-Qaida attack on U.S. soil. Indeed, in a May 19 appearance on Fox News Sunday, Dick Cheney stated flatly that dwelling too publicly on the former would only encourage the latter:

It's a very real concern that if we're going to deal with the next attack—and we started this morning talking about the prospects of another attack—the last thing we want to do is to go out and lay out on the record now our capabilities in terms of how we collect information.

Cheney said much the same thing that same day on Meet the Press. Chatterbox feels fairly certain that Cheney himself was not the Times' "senior administration official." (That's because Cheney uses the word "noise" rather than "chatter" to describe the portents of doom emanating from the intelligence agencies.) But he very likely had a hand in formulating the White House's probable leak-to-the-Times media strategy.

Is the White House exaggerating the imminent danger? Chatterbox, not being well-sourced within al-Qaida, can't say. He does find it curious, however, that while the national security adviser, the vice president, and now FBI director Robert Mueller are doing their best to maximize Americans' sense of danger, the newly created White House Office of Homeland Security is keeping the nation on a relatively ho-hum yellow alert ("Elevated: Significant Risk of Terrorist Attacks"), right smack in the middle between green ("Low Risk of Terrorist Attacks") and red ("Severe Risk of Terrorist Attacks"). According to Homeland Security Presidential Directive Three, a yellow alert should prompt consideration of:

1) Increasing surveillance of critical locations;
2) Coordinating emergency plans as appropriate with nearby jurisdictions;
3) Assessing whether the precise characteristics of the threat require the further refinement of preplanned Protective Measures;
4) and Implementing, as appropriate, contingency and emergency response plans.

Nowhere on this list does Chatterbox see "5. Spreading panic in order to stifle debate about the Bush administration's competence during prior disasters." But these guidelines are new, and no doubt susceptible to broad interpretation.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of Dick Cheney by John Sommers II/Reuters.
E-mail Timothy Noah at .
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Reader Comments From The Fray:


If Noah thinks this is overkill now, after September 11, I can only imagine what his reaction would have been had the Bush Administration "connected the dots" in August 2001 and tried to implement a security crack-down on all U.S. airports, targeting Arabs in flight schools and trying to board planes, based solely on the speculation in the FBI August 8 memo.

--Mitch

(To find or answer this post, click here.)


This episode makes for a nice reminder of how easy it is to manipulate the media when you control virtually all information of interest. (And also how cranky folks can get when you're stingy with it.)

--Josh Pollack

(To find or answer this post, click here.)

Of course it's political. It's political for two reasons:
1.) To deflect the (somewhat) unfair criticism of Bush et al. for not preventing 9/11, and;
2.) So that God forbid when the next one happens, this same flap won't happen again. Get ready for daily, "something bad's gonna happen" reports from now on, because sooner or later they're going to be right. This is Cover Your Ass time for the Bushies. Of course Daschle is already criticizing the Bushies for scaring people!

I don't know if I'm more worried by al-Qaida or ourselves.

--Hedgehog

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The Threat-O-Meter is stuck on yellow. Despite repeated warnings of falling bridges, nonsense nuclear power plant alerts, and even the possible fouling of Mickey's Magic Kingdom waters, the meter never moves. Congress is green with envy and red hot in retrospect. But the Dems of doubt and Repubs of requisite support are all scribbling in only black and white newsprint moments. We're revisiting Pearl Harbor in the Congressional Record with another round of "I told you so, you should have known, you should have seen." It's all so much sadly psychic political puce colored puke.

In the Middle East (whether in Israel or Palestine), the threat is constant and it doesn't have a daily color code other than blood red. Color me soothing green, or paint me angry red, but quit telling me I'm just forever vigilant yellow. I'm tired of the big Chiquita banana of bi-weekly banal warnings

--REW-OEM

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What if Bush and Co. reacted to the memos and intelligence and "chatter" immediately? What if, in June or August or even September they had started dragging in middle eastern men in flight schools for interrogation?... What if routine surveillance and wiretapping had been approved by the Justice Department on all Arabic persons for no other reason than because they fit the profile of these threats?... Maybe, just maybe, the plot would have been delayed. Maybe, just maybe, it would have been disrupted forever. But more probably it would have gone down at another time.

Our country doesn't do fear and loathing very well. Threats or not, after a while we get back to work, back to school, back to worrying over the ten thousand crazy things that occupy our minds every day. That is our knack for taking care of business, for taking care of family, for taking care of what's important at this time. The vigilance would have evaporated, just like it is right now. That is our strength...and our vulnerability.

--Loran

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