Sunday, August 13, 2006

Insider trading, national security style

At the risk of beating a dead horse, there is further need to point out that the Sunday New York Times continues to peddle the line that the news about the Heathrow liquid bomb plot was merely a serendipitous addition to an already agreed upon Republican stategy to make last week about getting the focus back on their supposed strength in the GWOT in the run-in to the November elections:

In Wake of News, a Plan: Uniting Party and President

... That picture of Republican disunity eased dramatically this week with the defeat on Tuesday of Senator Joseph I. Lieberman in the Democratic primary in Connecticut and the news on Thursday that Britain had foiled a potentially large-scale terrorist plot.

The White House and Congressional Republicans used those events to unleash a one-two punch, first portraying the Democrats as vacillating when it came to national security, and then using the alleged terror plot to hammer home the continuing threat faced by the United States ...

The entire effort was swiftly coordinated by the Republican National Committee and the White House, using the same political machinery that carried them to victory in 2004 ... The effort continued with the news of the British intelligence breakthrough, with the message that the plot had highlighted the stakes of a fight that the Democrats, according to Republicans, were not equipped to face.


As we now know, this sequence is false: the two pillars of the strategy were simultaneous. Bush and Cheney knew as early as the previous Friday that there was a major UK investigation underway, and recurrence of the topic in last Sunday's teleconference with Tony Blair was as clear as a signal as needed that big news was coming. By Monday, Bush was eagerly discussing terrorist plots in a Q&A ostensibly about Hezbollah, and by Wednesday Cheney had specifically set up a teleconference with reporters, hooked supposedly to one single outcome of another party's primary.

There is a token denial way down in the story ["For people to suggest there was somehow a larger, coordinated effort between the Lieberman loss and the disruption of the terror plot is just absurd," said Brian Jones, a spokesman for the Republican Party] but the timeline speaks for itself. Are John Reid and Tony Blair aware that their sharing of terrorism information with the White House is being fed directly to political operatives in Washington? Even if they don't care, their security services, trying to keep an informational advantage, might.

Note also that there's a tell-tale " ... in Washington contributed to this story" at the end of the story, in addition to the Jim Rutenberg byline. "..." is the topic of this post.

UPDATE: This NBC News report that the British only moved in on the alleged plotters after pressure from the US is consistent with the idea that the White House knew much more sooner than they have acknowledged about the investigation. And Dan Froomkin assembles a wide array of links on the Republican strategy, in particular the role of Dick Cheney. Also, it's not the first time that White House blabbing may have compromised an investigation.

FINAL UPDATE 25 NOVEMBER: The Independent (UK) is reporting that the investigation was compromised by an arrest in Pakistan undertaken at the urging of the US. So the only question remains -- what was the rush?

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