And apparently there's some fire to go with that smoke. As USA Today reported ("Ridge Reveals Clashes On Alerts" by Mimi Hall, 10 May 2005):
"The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says. ..."'More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it,' Ridge told reporters. 'Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, "For that?"'"
By coincidence, when Boulder District Attorney Mary Lacy made her first announcement, transcribed by the Rocky Mountain News, she mentioned her work with Bush's Department of Homeland Security several times, naming agents of that department, and pointing out that her own investigator, Mark Spray, had been sent off to Thailand a week earlier "with little more than four hours notice."
It probably took Judge Anna Diggs Taylor around a week to wrap up the wording of her decision, and if the NSA were spying on her without a warrant, the timing of sending off a Boulder agent just in time to generate a sensational headline a week later would be no problem.
In a way, it would be nothing new: Republican operatives working out of Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch's office successfully hacked into the computers of and spied on several prominent Democrats, most notably Massachusetts Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, for over a year from the Spring of 2002 through April of 2003. As The Boston Globe noted on January 22, 2004, the memos were then leaked at useful moments to The Washington Times, Bob Novak, and others:
"Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Committee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe."From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
"The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
"With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
"But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
"The revelation comes as the battle of judicial nominees is reaching a new level of intensity. Last week, President Bush used his recess power to appoint Judge Charles Pickering to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, bypassing a Democratic filibuster that blocked a vote on his nomination for a year because of concerns over his civil rights record."
Investigations into the "computer glitch" have been blocked by Senate Republicans for three years now, and the data was used to successfully torpedo several of Kennedy's and other Democrats' efforts against Bush's federal judicial appointments of right-wing extremists.
So we have Republicans who have admitted spying illegally. Who brag about it. And who have evidently - according to Tom Ridge - played the media like a violin for years. Could it be that the Karr/Ramsey case is another Soviet-style manipulation of the media?
Or is that too paranoid to contemplate?
Tragically, there are virtually no investigative reporters left in America, and the few who are still working find incredible roadblocks - and over the past year the threat of imprisonment - when looking into the workings of the Bush administration's intelligence services.
So, at the worst for Republicans who trot out "news" and "terror alerts" to misdirect our attention, this will probably just be chalked up as Coincidence Number 14 on Keith Olbermann's list.
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