The High Price Of Partisan Politics

Dick Morris, Bill Clinton's Chief Political Advisor, has a good article on how partisan politics could jeopardize our national security. The most recent example being the charge that the Bush administration is manipulating the terror warnings for political advantage. He writes,

America is not helped, and is badly hurt, when our partisans do not observe common sense and the paramount necessity of defending the national interest in their political rhetoric. Words have consequences, and the excessive Democratic partisanship now - like the vitriolic Republican partisanship in the Clinton years - harms the national interest in clear and apparent ways.


Besieged by critics who claimed that it was raising the terror threat to staunch Kerry's momentum as he emerged from his convention, the Bush people felt obliged to release the fact that the British and Pakistanis had arrested al Qaeda computer guru Mohammed Nasin Noor Khan in Pakistan on July 13.


This unfortunate release of information reportedly crippled ongoing British efforts to use Khan - or at least his computer and e-mail - to communicate with, and therefore identify, his al Qaeda colleagues.


Once the terrorists read in the newspaper or saw on CNN that Khan was in Western custody, his usefulness to our intelligence services was fatally compromised. One British intelligence figure explained, in classic understatement, "It made our task more difficult."


He mentions how difficult, if not impossible, falsely manipulating the threat would have been, showing how out of synch the conspiracy theorists are with reality, he writes,

Having worked at the White House, I know the obvious: That it is totally impossible to do something as public as raise a terror alert just for political purposes. Too many people are involved, and the circle of information is held too widely to get the kind of complicity necessary for so partisan a step. The newspapers would soon find out that the alert had no basis in intelligence and the resulting outcry would dwarf any that we have heard thus far.

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