I Cogitate

"...In all fairness, as we observe last October and we observer again tonight, we could possibly construct a similar timeline of terror events and warnings and their relationship to the opening of new chain stores around the country.  But if merely a reasonable case could be made that any of these juxtapositions of events are more than just coincidences, especially the one last week in which terror policy was again injected directly into a political race, it underscores the need for questions to be asked in this country, questions about what is prudence and what is fear-mongering."

OLBERMANN:  The term we employ is the nexus of politics and terror.  It does not imply that there is no terror, but it also does not deny that there is politics.  And it refuses to assume that counterterror measures in this country are not being influenced by politics.

Our third story on the COUNTDOWN, the basis of all this, at heart, remarks made on May 10, 2005, by a former Bush administration official discussing the old color-coded terror threat warning system.  More often than not, he said, “We were the least inclined to raise it.  Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment, sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don‘t necessarily put the country on alert.  There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it.  And we said, ‘For that?‘”

The speaker was the first secretary of Homeland Security, Tom Ridge.  In The light of those remarks and his criticism this week of the vice president for politicizing terror in the context of the Connecticut senatorial primary, it is imperative that we exam each of the coincidences of timing since 2002, including the one last week in which excoriating comments by leading Republicans about leading Democrats just happened to precede arrests in vast purported terror plot, arrests that we now know were carried out on timeline requested not by British, nor necessitated by the evidence, but requested by this government.

We introduce these coincidences to you exactly as we did when we first compiled this top 10 list after the revelation that the announced threats New York‘s subway system, last October, had been wildly overblown.  And we do so by reminding you and ourselves, here, that perhaps the simplest piece of wisdom in the world is called “the logic fallacy.”  Just because event A occurred and then event B occurs, that does not automatically mean that event A caused event B.  But neither does it say the opposite.  The “Nexus of Politics and Terror,” please judge for yourself.
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