Thanks for the Heads-Up
You don't have to be a cynic to believe that the point of the warnings is not to save lives so much as political hides. After all, we can't go about our daily business much differently just because of these dire pronouncements. Nor have they budged the Homeland Security Office's color-coded "threat level" from its weaselly yellow. What this orchestrated chorus of Cassandras can do is guarantee that we duly credit the Bush administration for giving us a heads-up should disaster strike between now and Election Day 2004. Not so incidentally, the new warnings also help facilitate our amnesia about the fracas over how low a priority Al Qaeda was for the White House before Sept. 11.

To see how low, there's no need to learn what was in that top-secret briefing that the president received as he settled down for his monthlong vacation at his Texas ranch on Aug. 6. Reports at the time show that Mr. Bush broke off from work early and spent most of that day fishing. If he had received foreknowledge of an attack that morning, he would have acted upon it, and no Democratic leader has said otherwise (despite Dick Cheney's smears to the contrary).

But that's not the end of the story. A far more revealing indication of the administration's mañana mindset about terrorism comes a month later, on Sept. 9, when Donald Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto if Congress moved $600 million out of the White House's prized ballistic missile defense system and into counterterrorism. On Sept. 10, John Ashcroft submitted a final Justice Department budget request calling for increases in 68 programs, none of them directly related to combating terrorism.

We are the richest, most can-do country in the world, but at home we're pursuing the war on terrorism with a management style that's pure Kmart. Back in October Mr. Bush declared that his new director of homeland security, Tom Ridge, in charge of coordinating some 70 federal agencies and countless local ones, would "have the full attention and complete support of the very highest levels of our government." Nine months later, Mr. Ridge has neither. What he does have is a new, less-than-high-tech headquarters, with an aboveground Washington address that can be taken out simultaneously with the White House.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/opinion/25RICH.html