political intelligence: oxymoron for the 2000's

Hiatus override! I've criticized Dean for being wrong on an issue before - but on the issue of politicizing intelligence, he's got it right. And just like his famous observation that capturing Saddam didn't make Americans safer, he's being vilified for pointing out the obvious once again.

This is what Tom Ridge, defender of the Homeland, actually said last Sunday:

But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror, the reports that have led to this alert are the result of offensive intelligence and military operations overseas, as well as strong partnerships with our allies around the world, such as Pakistan.

emphasis mine. Of course, what Ridge neglected to mention was:

Much of the information that led the authorities to raise the terror alert at several large financial institutions in the New York City and Washington areas was three or four years old, intelligence and law enforcement officials said on Monday. They reported that they had not yet found concrete evidence that a terrorist plot or preparatory surveillance operations were still under way.

Here is what Howard Dean said:

It's just impossible to know how much of this is real and how much of this is politics. And I suspect there's some of both in it.

It strikes me that using four-year old information to issue a terror alert warning, a serious occassion which the director of Homeland Security uses to make a campaign pitch, does indeed have some politics interjected where there should be none.

Atrios points out that the media critics of Dean today have not been shy about saying accusing Presidents of politicizing intelligence in the past. But Dean is being accused of a straw-man argument he did not make, namely that all terror alerts are purely for wag-the-dog purposes. More on the relevance of this straw man later...

The Rightists immediately leapt baying for blood, with their same tired refrain of Repudiate This (hey hypocrites: Repudiate that yet?). Today, Glenn notes with pleasure that Kerry seems to have responded:

"I don't care what [Dean] said. I haven't suggested that and I won't suggest that," Kerry said. "I do not hold that opinion. I don't believe that.''

But Glenn is wrong - Kerry hasn't repudiated Dean's (correct) observation, he just disavowed knowledge of what Dean said - and Kerry was actually responding to a question about the straw man, not Dean's actual statement, in that quote.

It's actually a clever dodge, though blunted by the insistence by CBS that Kerry was "distancing" himself from Dean's comment when actually he did nothing of the sort. But Dean is useful to Kerry for the appearance of being "distanced" and still free to say things that are, once you get away from the talking head obfuscation, blatantly obvious to the average American (whose rationaliity I never impugn).