A new report from NBC News claims that Bush Administration officials pressured the British to arrest the London terrorists a week before British surveillance work was complete (via TPM via commenter Suzy). The attack, according to the report, was not imminent.
This is explosive news:
A senior British official knowledgeable about the case said British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least another week to try to obtain more evidence, while American officials pressured them to arrest the suspects sooner. The official spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the case.
In contrast to previous reports, the official suggested an attack was not imminent, saying the suspects had not yet purchased any airline tickets. In fact, some did not even have passports.
[. . .]
At the White House, a top aide to President Bush denied the account.
[. . .]
The British official said the Americans also argued over the timing of the arrest of suspected ringleader Rashid Rauf in Pakistan, warning that if he was not taken into custody immediately, the U.S. would “render” him or pressure the Pakistani government to arrest him.
British security was concerned that Rauf be taken into custody “in circumstances where there was due process,” according to the official, so that he could be tried in British courts. Ultimately, this official says, Rauf was arrested over the objections of the British.
This goes way beyond what we understood previously — that the Bush Administration knew about the arrests ahead of time, and timed a PR offensive against the Democrats around it.
It turns out that it was the other way around: the Bush Administration orchestrated the timing of the arrests to coordinate them with the PR offensive, which attacked Democrats after Ned Lamont’s victory in the Connecticut primary.
For the GOP, the short term political importance of getting the Lamont victory, and the developing sense that America had fully turned against the Iraq War, off the news was reason enough to disrupt an active terror investigation. The disruption hurt the legal case against the terrorists — it will be much harder to convict them without passports or airline tickets. The GOP was so insistent on the timing that they threatened to “render” the lead suspect if the British did not comply with their wishes.
The Republicans, in other words, once again played politics with national security, and hurt anti-terrorism efforts as they did so.
They cannot be trusted to protect us from the threat of terrorism because — to paraphrase The Downing Street Memo — they fix terror investigations around smear campaigns.
Update: The All-Spin Zone, The Heretik, The Next Hurrah, Suburban Guerrilla, Sysyphus Shrugged, Brilliant at Breakfast, Shakespeare’s Sister (crossposted on Ezra Klein, ksh01 @ Daily Kos, MoJo Blog, Cursor, and Memeorandom have more. See Technorati for a full list of blogs commenting on this story.
Update II (8/14/06): Dan Rubin, who writes the blog Blinq for the Philadelphia Inquirer, is skeptical of what he calls “this conspiracy theory,” but he has written a nice summary of the conflicting reports on the timing of the arrests. As I noted in his comment section, however, his claim that the report came from a single source is not exactly right. Parts of the report (the claim, for instance, that “the attack was not imminent”) did come from a single UK source, but the most important revelation — that Bush Administration officials rushed the arrests — has been confirmed by multiple sources in both America and the UK.
7 Comments on "Explosive Report: Bush Administration Rushed British Terror Arrests"
Richard Cranium:
It’s even a bit worse than all that, Matt -
FWIW, I posted extensively on this last night, and reached almost the same conclusions you did.
Kevin Wolf:
Unfortunately, the media has been so bad these past 6 years that many people will think this is another he said-he said deal, and tune it out.
While in fact, to anyone who’s been paying attention, this is no surprise.
I sometimes seriously wonder if we’re going to survive the next two years.
The Heretik:
“Imminent”…
What’s imminent to me may not be so imminent to you. The Americans over here seemed to think the plot over there was more imminent than the Brits over there: “British police were planning to continue to run surveillance for at least anoth…
gilman:
It was apparent from reports in the first several hours after the arrests that at least the U.S. reaction and stringent requirements about onboard luggage were most likely politically motivated, rather than security based. From the beginning, the Brits said the investigation had been going for months, that most of the leaders had been picked up, that no ‘bombs’ had been built and that they hadn’t even come up with the liquid mixture that would work for riding on airplanes. Then, there’s the Administration’s record on security matters. But Americans are a pretty conservative and gullible lot, so the Bush Administration rightly figured it’s advantage. Latest news also raises questions about the Brit’s airport security reaction, but maybe there was some basis, or maybe they just pressured by the Americans and responding to Blair’s own political needs.
daniel rubin:
if i were manipulating this for political gain, why would i wait until AFTER the connecticut primary to force arrests?
Matt:
if i were manipulating this for political gain, why would i wait until AFTER the connecticut primary to force arrests?
Maybe they thought that Lieberman was going to win. Maybe they didn’t anticipate the strength and scope of the news stories that would come out of it. Maybe they did try to get it done before the primary, but the British stymied them. It’s impossible to know yet, but I’m sure that the full story will come out long after the political damage has been done.
If your implication is that since the arrests didn’t happen before the primary, the Bush administration could not have been manipulating the timing, I have to disagree vehemently. There were reasons for them to do it before the election, but there were also plenty of reasons to do it afterwards. Either way, the NBC Report makes it clear that the Bush administration coordinated the arrests with their smear campaign.
gilman:
To Daniel Rubin: The simple answer is that George Bush doesn’t run the British government and thus couldn’t dictate when the arrests were going to be made, although I’m sure he and probably Cheney and others tried. The more compex answer is the timing was apparently dependent on forcing the Brits’ hand, which required getting that fellow in Pakistan arrested first. The Brits opposed the U.S. plan for his arrest and rendition to the States, but apparently they went behind the Brits’ back and forced the issue with the Pakistani government. In that situation, the best the Brits could get to save the whole operation was for the arrest to be done on the up and up, i.e., by Pakistan. The arrests in England immediately followed, but the timing was a little late for the CT primary. However, Lieberman is small potatoes for Bush and co. In any case, another U.S.-blown British operation to improve Anglo-American relations.
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