They are going to do it again and again
"I spoke with Sy Hersh recently after delivering some documents to him (you'll read more on this in mid-September), and found him bubbling as ever, with a focus on the terror alert announced on Saturday. He says he has some information about this from a tipster at the Department of Homeland Security and also some information from a White House source close to Rove.
In sum, he says that Gov. Dean's charge that this is all political manipulation is 100% correct. The data that was the basis of the alert has in fact been in US hands for two years plus and was previously rejected as a basis for an alert due to its staleness. A decision to go to alert status came from within the WhiteHouse and was driven by a strategy that Rove has been fine tuning for twoyears on fear manipulation as an election tool.
Also, as The New Republic previously reported, the arrests in Pakistan that provided the "context" for these alerts was also scripted and agreed in advance between Musharraf and GOP officials. Rove has very detailed research which purports to show that terror alerts can be manipulated to drive support for Bush. Rove is looking for a series of such alerts with growing intensity up to the election date. The
alerts will all be timed to divert attention away from Kerry whenever he scores an important success or has a positive appearance. Rove originally planned to announce this alert on Friday, but others in the White House felt this timing would be too obvious, so it was put back a day. Brian Ross at ABC News has been working on a story on this.
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