Bush shoots for ‘Jaws,’ delivers ‘Jaws 2’

A year ago next month, the Los Angeles Times quoted a source — identified only by the labyrinthine description “a U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism” — who insisted that the purported “Library Tower plot” was one of many al-Qaida operations that had not gotten very far past the conceptual stage.

The former staff director of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council — now a news analyst for NBC News and MSNBC — Roger Cressey, puts it a little more bluntly.

In our conversation, he put the “Library Tower story” into a category he called the “What-Ifs” — as in the old “Saturday Night Live sketches that tested the range of comic absurdity:

What if ... Superman had worked for the Nazis?

What if ... Spartacus had had a Piper Cub during the battle against the Romans in 70 B.C.?

More ominously, the L.A. Times source who debunked the Library Tower story said that those who could correctly measure the flimsiness of the scheme “feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president.”

But Mr. Bush, you’re the decider.

And you decided that the Library Tower story should be scored as one for you.

And you continued with a second dubious claim of counter-terror success. “We broke up a Southeast Asian terror cell grooming operatives for attacks inside the United States,” you said.

Well, sir, you’ve apparently stumped the intelligence community completely with this one.

In his article, Mr. Swanson suggests that in the last week there has been no reporting even hinting at what exactly you were talking about.

He hypothesizes that either you were claiming credit for a ring broken up in 1995 or that this was just the Library Tower story “by another name.”

Another CIA source suggests to NBC News that since the Southeast Asian cell dreamed of a series of attacks on the same day, you declared the Library Tower one threat thwarted, and all their other ideas, a second threat thwarted.

Our colleague Mr. Cressey sums it up:

This “Southeast Asian cell” was indeed the tale of the Library Tower, simply repeated.

Repeated, Mr. Bush, in consecutive sentences in the State of the Union — in your constitutionally mandated status report on the condition and safety of the nation.

You showed us the same baby twice and claimed it was twins.

And then you said that was two for you.

Your third claim, sir, read thusly: “We uncovered an al-Qaida cell developing anthrax to be used in attacks against America.”

Again, the professionals in counter-intelligence were startled to hear about this.

Last fall, two Washington Post articles cited sources in the FBI and other governmental agencies who said that hopes by foreign terrorists to use anthrax in this country were fanciful at best, farcical at worst.

And every effort to link the 2001 anthrax mailings in this country to foreign sources has also struck out. The entire investigation is barely still active.

Mr. Cressey goes a little further. Anything that might even resemble an al-Qaida cell “developing anthrax,” he says, was in the “dreaming” stages.

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