DOTS ALL, FOLKS

Source: New York Post "Dots All, Folks" by John Podhoretz
August 4, 2004 http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/26197.htm

DOTS ALL, FOLKS

THIS weekend, the Bush ad ministration took various pieces of data, turned them into data points, and placed each point on a piece of graph paper just like we did back in high school.

Data point No. 1: Multiple sources indicating al Qaeda fully intends to try and hit us before the election.

Data point No. 2: Hard evidence from the hard drive of an al Qaeda member featuring very specific information about five buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington. The information gathered on the buildings was several years old. But the United States only found out that al Qaeda had it over the weekend.

Then the Bush administration drew a line from point 1 to point 2. If al Qaeda wants to hit us and it has all kinds of material on those five buildings, then prudence dictates that we intensify our efforts to protect those buildings in order to stave off an attack.

In other words, the Bush administration connected the dots.

Remember how the Bush administration was attacked during the 9/11 Commission hearings precisely because it didn't "connect the dots" before 9/11? On March 25, the editorial writers at The New York Times excoriated the administration for what they called "the chain of miscommunications, wrong guesses and misplaced priorities that left the nation so poorly defended against the terrorists." The Times even praised the Clinton administration by contrast for being more serious about terrorism than the Bushies were.

The conclusion of the 9/11 Commission was that there had been a "failure of vision," an inability to see into a likely future in which al Qaeda would hijack planes and fly them into buildings.

Administration critics were particularly insistent on the predictive value of the Aug. 6, 2001 presidential daily briefing, with the headline that read "Al Qaeda Determined to Strike In U.S." How could the president not have sent everyone to battle stations to find the data to connect the dots that would have prevented 9/11?

This weekend, the administration did exactly what its critics said it should have done before 9/11. It connected the dots. It raised the threat level to orange and let America and the world know which specific buildings were under threat.

And how have some administration critics reacted?

They accuse Bush of playing politics with terror. Of lying, in other words, about the peril we're in.

Let's go right to the source, The New York Times editorial page: "The Times reports today that much of the information that led to the heightened alert is actually three or four years old and that authorities had found no concrete evidence that a terror plot was actually under way," the editorialists wrote yesterday.

This is true. And it's entirely beside the point. So al Qaeda collected the data about the five buildings before 9/11. The data they gathered are still relevant.

Take the Citigroup Center. Aside from heightened security, nothing has changed about the place: 53rd Street still runs west, 54th runs east, Lex goes downtown, Third goes uptown and the garage entrances are where they were. The information may be a few years old. But it isn't dated.

No matter, saith The Times: "This news does nothing to bolster the confidence Americans need that the administration is not using intelligence for political gain."

No, what The Times and others chastising the administration for the supposedly suspicious timing of this terror alert are demonstrating is that they were simply "using" the connect-the-dots argument "for political gain."

It's only four months since one-time counterterrorism chief Richard Clarke electrified the nation by going before the 9/11 Commission and claiming that Bush had failed to grasp the threat from al Qaeda. Clarke went so far as to apologize to the families of those killed on 9/11 for the failure.

This was the first successful political assault on the president's chief strength — his leadership of the War on Terror. By portraying Bush as having somehow allowed 9/11 to happen, Bush's enemies finally found a way to seem harder-line and more serious about the subject than the president himself.

No matter. They didn't mean it. They don't mean it. They just want to destroy him, and they'll say or do or argue just about anything to see that it happens.

Some of the attacks on Bush are crazy. Some are intellectually indefensible spin, and therefore nothing less than contemptible. This latest attack goes in the "contemptible" pile.

E-mail: podhoretz@nypost.com