During yesterday’s entertaining White House press briefing, Tony Snow rolled out an oldie but a goodie.
“[T]he al Qaeda that exists today is not the al Qaeda that existed September 11, 2001. That is an al Qaeda that was a more traditional, top-down organization where you had bin Laden and a series of lieutenants and he issued orders and they carried them out.
“That organization was smashed. Three-quarters of its leadership — or, I guess, two-thirds of its leadership has either been killed or captured.”
The White House hasn’t used this line in quite a while, and for good reason — it’s a made-up number.
White House and U.S. intelligence officials declined to provide any back-up data for how they developed the new number — or even to explain the methodology that was used, which they said was classified. The absence of any explanation, as well as the timing, prompted some counterterrorism experts to deride the figure as “meaningless” and predict the revision could fuel allegations that the administration is massaging terrorism data for political purposes.
“It’s like a shell game,” said Vince Cannistraro, a former top CIA counterterrorism official. “This kind of thing is susceptible to all kinds of manipulation.”
An official with the recently disbanded 9/11 commission also dismissed the new number, noting that it was impossible to get a firm handle on precisely the number of Al Qaeda “leaders” that were in place at the time of the September 11 attacks — the definition that the CIA says it used as its baseline for the estimate.
“It was meaningless when they said two thirds and it’s meaningless when they said three fourths,” said the official, who asked not to be identified. “This sounds like it was pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”
Alas, so many of the White House’s talking points are.