And Most of You Keep Believing Him

President Bush claimed in his State of the Union speech to have prevented four terrorist plots. Phew! It’s a good thing to know that we tossed out our Bill of Rights for some actual REASON – I mean other than turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorism.

Except that we didn’t.

1.-“We stopped an al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast.”

An October 8, 2005, LA Times story, headlined “Scope of Plots Bush Says Were Foiled Is Questioned,” cited “several counter-terrorism officials” as saying that “the plot never progressed past the planning stages…. ‘To take that and make it into a disrupted plot is just ludicrous,’ said one senior FBI official….At most it was a plan that was stopped in its initial stages and was not an operational plot that had been disrupted by authorities.”

On Feb. 10, 2006, the LA Times quoted a “US official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism,” who said that “the Library Tower plot was one of many Al Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage….The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan that that of the president.”

Michael Scheuer, an al Qaeda expert in the CIA’s counter-terrorism center, told the Voice of America: “This doesn’t sound like anything that I would recall as a major threat, or as a major success in stopping it….My impression [was that the National Security Council] culled through information to look for something that resembled a serious threat in 2002. It doesn’t strike me, either as someone who was there or as someone who has followed al Qaeda pretty closely, that this was really a serious sort of effort.”

A February 10, 2006 Washington Post story cited “several U.S. intelligence officials” who “said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk.”