BushCo Creates Its Own Reality Again

In the least surprising news story of the year, it turns out that the United States pressured the British to speed things along in the recent liquid-bomb terror investigation (from NBC via TPM Muckraker):

NBC News has learned that U.S. and British authorities had a significant disagreement over when to move in on the suspects in the alleged plot to bring down trans-Atlantic airliners bound for the United States.

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. The source did say, however, that police believe one U.K.-based suspect was ready to conduct a "dry run." British authorities had wanted to let him go forward with part of the plan, but the Americans balked.

At the White House, a top aide to President Bush denied the account.

I'm not the least bit surprised that the White House has denied this. After all, the GOP is really pushing its "Democrats Love Terrorists" agenda right now, so it certainly wouldn't be in BushCo's interest to admit that it interfered with yet another overseas terror investigation. I mean, they wouldn't want it to look like they were once again aiding and abetting terrorists now, would they?

Who could forget (well, that's a dumb statement -- everybody forgot, because it was the most underreported story of 2004) when the Bush Administration raised the terror alert just after the 2004 Democratic Convention, and in doing so, seriously disrupted a British terror investigation:

The effort by U.S. officials to justify raising the terror alert level last week may have shut down an important source of information that has already led to a series of al Qaeda arrests, Pakistani intelligence sources have said.

Until U.S. officials leaked the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan to reporters, Pakistan had been using him in a sting operation to track down al Qaeda operatives around the world, the sources said. * * *

One senator told CNN that U.S. officials should have kept Khan's role quiet.

"You always want to know the evidence," said Sen. George Allen.

"In this situation, in my view, they should have kept their mouth shut and just said, 'We have information, trust us.'"

In other words, someone in the Bush Administration commited treason merely to score some political points in the days after the Democratic Convention. Khan, unfortunately, also had a connection to the cell that carried out the London Bombings a year later, so who knows what an uninterrupted investigation might have yielded.

Of course, that wasn't the first time that the Bush Regime put the security of America at risk in order to score political points. The outing of Valerie Plame and decision to invade Iraq -- a decision that most Americans now think hurt U.S. security -- are other examples of this.

And it looks like they pulled the same kind of crap with regard to recent British investigation on the liquid bomb plot. I expect, however, that this story will be buried as well because it demonstrates, more than anything else, that the Lieberman defeat has shaken up the G.O.P. to such an extent that the Bush Administration, in order to counter it, was willing to jeopardize the security of the country.

The Democrats should make it their business to inform as many Americans as possible about this latest betrayal of our national security, but they probably won't.