Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge is backpedaling even faster on his own claims that the Bush administration politicized the terror alert system, saying today, “I don’t think it was ever politics.”
In a book out today, Ridge wrote that Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld “strongly urged” him to raise the alert level in the days before the 2004 presidential election. The excerpts from the book, The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege, caused a stir when they were released two weeks ago.
A vigorous, some might say dramatic, discussion ensued. Ashcroft strongly urged an increase in the threat level and was supported by Rumsfeld. There was absolutely no support for that position within our department. None. I wondered, “Is this about security or politics?”
Yesterday, Ridge said people were just “hyperventilating” over the comments and tried to walk them back.
“There was no pressure at all,” he told the Erie Times-News. Ashcroft and Rumsfeld “expressed their opinions. … The process worked … It was designed so that nobody could pressure anybody to do anything,” he told Good Morning America.
But today, he appeared on CNN’s American Morning to backpedal ever faster on his own comments.
“There’s never been any doubt in my mind whether any of these individuals,” meaning Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Secretary of State Colin Powell and FBI Director Robert Mueller, “they always had the security of America as the number one reason they would say, ‘Let’s go up, let’s not go up,'” Ridge said. “I don’t think it was ever politics. But in the political environment [of that time], people were thinking it was generated by that.”
So why did he question, “Is this about security or politics?” As Ridge said today:
I’m kinda musing and scratching my head, and I’ve got two people [Rumsfeld and Ashcroft] whose opinions I respect immensely. I’m not second guessing them, but I just say in the book, “Is it politics?” Perhaps the sentence should have been a paragraph later. Then we wouldn’t be having a conversation about it.
“I just want to make it very clear I’m not second guessing my colleagues ’cause I worked with them every single day,” he added.
