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Ed. note: This piece, by Andisheh Nouraee, will appear in this week’s issue of Creative Loafing.

Tom Ridge, who served as President Bush’s secretary of homeland security, is a selfish, dishonorable man.

To pimp his new book, Ridge finally confessed the Bush White House pressured him to raise the nation’s color-coded threat-level warning to “orange” in what he believes was an effort to influence the outcome of the 2004 presidential election.

He could have revealed this information to the public back when it mattered, prior to the 2004 election, but he would have killed his political career. As former governor of swing-state Pennsylvania, Ridge was a top 2008 Republican vice-presidential prospect.

Despite Ridge’s selfish hoarding of this critical information, Bush’s manipulation of terror warnings during the campaign was obvious to everyone willing to take a close look. Here’s what I wrote about it in August 2004:

[T]HERE IS PLENTY about the government’s periodic terror warnings to make even non-conspiracy-minded-Elvis-is-dead-Oswald-worked-alone types wonder whether the Bush/Cheney reelection team doesn’t at least have a hand in them.

Take, for example, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge’s July 31 warning about threats against important buildings in D.C., New York and New Jersey. Ridge didn’t find any space on his teleprompter to tell the public that the information he based the announcement on was pre-9/11 target scouting found on a laptop in Pakistan (nor did President Bush when he spoke to reporters the next day). Ridge did, however, have room in his announcement for a Bush/Cheney 2004 talking point highlighting Bush’s “leadership in the war against terror.” Smooth.

Campaign messages aside, how exactly is it a revelation that al-Qaeda wants to attack important buildings in D.C. and NYC? Haven’t we all been pretty certain of that since about, oh, late morning on Sept. 11, 2001? One government official who was privy to the info behind Ridge’s announcement commented that, “There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that is new.”

Ridge’s threat announcement, coming just as John Kerry began his highest-profile campaign trip yet, was just one in a long line of administration threat announcements that seems timed to serve the administration’s political needs rather than those of the public. In July, the day after John Kerry announced his selection of John Edwards as his running mate, Ridge held a so-called “status of the threat” news conference. Even in White House spokesman Scott McClellan’s assessment, the announcement offered no “precise or specific information related to time, place or location.” It didn’t help us, or law enforcement, but it did interrupt the “Boy, that John Edwards sure is charming, and handsome to boot!” media fiesta for a couple of hours.

Another recent “Is it terror or is it politics?” puzzler was Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Chief Robert Mueller’s “news” conference in June to “announce” the names of seven people whom the feds wanted to talk to in connection with terrorism. Only that time, it wasn’t much of a puzzle. I put “news” and “announce” in sarcastic quotation marks because six of the names already had been announced months before. The news conference was ominous in tone, but lacked substance. Ashcroft didn’t even sing!

And who can forget last month’s report in The New Republic (which, for the record, supported Gulf War 2: The Phantom Menace) that quoted a Pakistani intelligence official saying that the White House pressured Pakistan’s intelligence agency to capture a high-value target and announce it at the end of July to boost Bush’s “Is he doing a good job against terror?” poll numbers. Is it just me, or has this outsourcing to south Asia thing gotten out of hand?

Anyway, bing-bang-boom, whaddya know, Pakistan’s interior minister got on TV just hours before John Kerry’s acceptance speech and announced the capture of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, the FBI’s 22nd most wanted terrorist (19th in the AP Coaches Poll). The announcement was obviously just for U.S. media consumption; it was the middle of the night in Pakistan at the time.

Manipulating the War On Terror™ for political purposes is dangerous. If we can’t trust what the government tells us, it’s bound to hurt public readiness. Apparently, there’s a boy somewhere who keeps hollering about a wolf who can probably explain this better than I can.

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