A tale of two end-of-the-week news reports. What do they have in common? Well, they're both to do with terrorism. Also, they both involve the Bush administration sitting on information for a while before presenting it to the media. Let us glance at both and then draw conclusions. It is, as they say about real estate, comedy, and covering your sorry incompetent political ass, all in the timing.
First, hooray, we caught another High-Profile Terrorist Mastermind!Let all of Greater Wingnuttia dance and rejoice!
The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans.
Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay.
Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred to the internment camp in Cuba.
Thus, quite clearly, we are Winning the War on Terror.
Except for the report that the administration wanted to avoid sending to Congress, the report that shows that we are losing the war on terror:
A State Department report on terrorism due out next week will show a nearly 30 percent increase in terrorist attacks worldwide in 2006 to more than 14,000, almost all of the boost due to growing violence in Iraq and Afghanistan, U.S. officials said Friday.
The annual report's release comes amid a bitter feud between the White House and Congress over funding for U.S. troops in Iraq and a deadline favored by Democrats to begin a U.S. troop withdrawal.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her top aides earlier this week had considered postponing or downplaying the release of this year's edition of the terrorism report, officials in several agencies and on Capitol Hill said.
Ultimately, they decided to issue the report on or near the congressionally mandated deadline of Monday, the officials said.
Two stories about Terror, one a Feather in the Administration's Cap, the other giving it a Black Eye. Both come out simultaneously, or nearly so. One is a bit more dramatic than the other; glowering Terrorist Faces make for better graphics than do governmental reports, no matter how damning.
And the administration basically controlled the release time for both of these, except that in the second they were up against a legal deadline they couldn't weasel out of, even though we know they desperately wanted to.
Hmmm.
But I'm sure the timing here is a coincidence. I am, after all, not a cynic...