Yesterday, before leaving home to come to this office (which is near Citicorp, one of the five targeted buildings), I cried. My jag was brief, but the news had confused and frightened me, and I needed to have it. Then my mother called. When I got to work, I discovered that most of the people in my bank of cubicles had been called by their out-of-town mothers.
On Sunday Lieberman jumped down Dean’s throat for suggesting that this terror alert might have a political motivation. Will he apologize today? Don’t hold your breath, but it turns out that much of the information about the targeted buildings is as old as the similar information in the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Brief, which Bush ignored. I am happy that the new discovery was relayed to the media promptly and wouldn’t have it any other way. But why were government officials “circumspect” about the dating of the material when they broke the news? Why wait twenty-four hours to release that component? There was a political convention rather recently. It’s hard to resist the conclusion that once again, we’ve been played.