A failure to communicate?

July 2, 2007

Towards the end of a report about the Department of Homeland Security responding to possible terrorist threats over the summer, ABC News added a disconcerting tidbit of information:

As ABCNews.com reported, U.S. law enforcement officials received intelligence reports two weeks ago warning of terror attacks in Glasgow and Prague, the Czech Republic, against “airport infrastructure and aircraft.”

The warnings apparently never reached officials in Scotland, who said this weekend they had received “no advance intelligence” that Glasgow might be a target.

Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff declined to comment specifically on the report today, but said “everything that we get is shared virtually instantaneously with our counterparts in Britain and vice versa.”

I certainly hope so.

As James Joyner put it, “It would be an outrage, indeed, if we had solid intelligence about an attack in the UK and didn’t get around to warning them.”

It’s like 9/10/01 all over again.

  • The radical Republicrooks always like to scream “electing Democrats will get your children killed!!!” but then they fail to warn other countries, who will undoubtedly resent this failure, and might even reduce the information we get from them. (Assuming that the information we get from them does any good, which is a somewhat dubious assumption)

    How Republicans “make us safer”:

    Starting unnecessary wars
    Letting terrorists escape
    Training new terrorists
    Destroying our military strength
    Pissing off our allies
    Burning CIA assets
    Creating failed states
    Fostering drug cartels
    Squandering our moral authority

    Am I forgetting anything?

  • I’m hearing a lot about “homeland” security lately. I wish Goebbels had never made that term central to his propaganda. I strongly wish the Cheney-Rove administration hadn’t found Goebbels’ word so attractive (which is to say effective at engendering fear).

  • I guess when they talk about following up all leads from now on, they mean installing pervasive surveillance and using the DoJ to attack Democrats’ political fortunes.

    Link.
    Link.

    Or putting every kid wearing a heavy metal t-shirt on the terrorist threat list, as the FBI’s 500,000-name-strong list seems to suggest.

    Don’t worry, the big soft conservatives will protect you. From corporations paying tax to provide poor Americans with free health care. But not from terrorism.

  • Our intel groups have not been good getting correct info out to others in the past. Coordination of intel has not been a strength they have demonstrated recently.

    Racerx****** yes you are forgetting something.
    The military is killing innocent Iraqis and calling them al queda and the MSM reports it as truth. So it would be:

    Turning the press into a propaganda machine.

    See Glenn Greenwald’s report over at Salon.

  • I am trying to figure out why this report or a summary of it hasn’t been made public. The modus operandi of BushCo has been to scare the rubes whenever they find themselves in hot water. There is no doubt that they are now in hot water. The list is a long one but the domestic spying and purge scandals do stand out for their thermal effect on the water. We saw Lieberman yesterday try to use the failed car bombings in Great Britain as a reason for backing off investigating the domestic spying scandal and even to argue for greater curtailment of our civil liberties. This report could easily be use in the same fashion. BushCo may be playing a subtle game here. Leak the report, downplay its significance, and let others make the case for them.

    It is also noteworthy that the ABC news report ends with this creditability adding tidbit.

    Unlike the United States, officials in Germany have publicly warned that the country could face a major attack this summer, also comparing the situation to the pre-9/11 summer of 2001.

    But we have no way of knowing if the information that the Germans have based their warnings on are independent of the information in the US report. Until I see specifics from the report, I will remain skeptical of the veracity of the report and will be wary of manipulation at the hands BushCo.

    One possibility which cannot be overlooked is that BushCo, i.e. Cheney, withheld the information on the Glasgow bombing in order to allow it to go through and generate panic which he could exploit. As part of this plan to exploit the rubes, the report was leaked to add fuel to the fire-sorry for the pun. Certainly this is speculation on my part and please don’t uncritically pick up the ball and run with it. Let’s be smart about it. I suggest that we all keep our eyes open for evidence of such Machiavellian inaction and action.

  • The direct exploitation by BushCo. of the failed car bombings to justify the elimination of or our civil liberties thus begins. Although, to be fair, I suppose we should include Lieberman as member of BushCo.

  • It would be an outrage, indeed, if we had solid intelligence about an attack in the UK and didn’t get around to warning them.

    outrage, yes, but also par for the course for a gang of thugs apparently determined to do everything wrong. it should be obvious by now that bin laden has no reason to attack so long as the administration is sticking to his plan, the bush-bin laden pact. it’s really sad to look at “reality based” reality and see for yourself that every terrorist attack helps bush, and the man is in need of serious help. the only way bush can continue his momentum is if we have more attacks.

  • “everything that we get is shared virtually instantaneously with our counterparts in Britain and vice versa.”

    By virtually instantaneously Shirtoff means “After we figure out what it means, decide whether we care, lose the report, find it again, read it again because we’ve forgotten what it said in the first place…”

  • It’s hard to get the sheep a-bleatin’ when there’s no image of a wolf at the door, so some nice, colorful videotape of smoke and flames pouring from the front of a Scottish airport are of immense value to the screaming fearmongers at the flock’s-noise network. And given that Murdock’s flock’s-noise network is the official “bleater” of this cowardly administration (and therefore a corporation to which that administration is, shall we say, “indebted”), it’s not hard to imagine “certain items not finding their way from point A(merica) to point B(ritain)….”

  • To say that it would be an outrage if we had solid intelligence about an attack in the UK and didn’t get around to warning them is an understatement.
    These cocksuckers would withhold intelligence that would save their own family if they thought it could both score them political points and further their agenda of turning America into a corporatist, police state.
    I’m not being flip. I actually believe they are every bit as evil as those that planned and executed 911. Except for the fact that they are all cocksucker pussies that martyr others instead of themselves.

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