You may have heard Bush tell voters last week that U.S. forces have detained or killed “more than three quarters of al Queda’s key members and associates.” The White House had been saying for a while that “two-thirds” of al Queda’s leaders had been taken out, so this sounds like a pretty impressive boost, right? It would be — if Bush hadn’t completely made up the 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.”
That seems to sum up Bush’s entire approach to governing, doesn’t it?
The truth is, the vast majority of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists have not been captured or killed, the threat of al Queda-related terrorism remains “as great as ever,” Osama bin Laden (remember him?) is still very much on the loose, so is Mullah Mohammed Omar, and so is Ayman Zawahiri, al Queda’s #2, who was all over the airwaves yesterday, taunting the United States and predicting our defeat in Iraq.
And unlike Bush’s campaign rhetoric, this reality wasn’t “pulled out of somebody’s orifice.”