Explosive Report: Bush Administration Rushed British Terror Arrests
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.
