How credible is ?credible??
By PAT MURPHY
Lethal weapons aren?t the only tools of war in a nation?s military arsenal. Another device packing a wallop is disinformation--the art of suckering enemies into making bad tactical decisions based on phony information.
Wartime deception is as old as the human habit of telling everyday lies. World War II was an incubator for especially ingenious military decep-tions that snookered Adolph Hitler and his generals prior to the D-Day invasion of Europe in 1944.
The British pulled off a particu-larly colorful ruse in April 1943, one that remains a legend in military disinformation. Dressing the male corpse of a pneumonia victim in an officer?s uniform and planting on it identifying papers for a ?Major William Martin? of the Royal Marines, it was dropped overboard from the submarine Seraph off the coast of Spain, chained to a water-tight briefcase stuffed with phony intelligence documents.
?Secret? papers falsely claiming plans for an Allied invasion of Greece eventually found their way to the German high command. The generals swallowed the bait and rushed rein-forcements to Greece. Alas, they learned too late that British and U.S. forces were invading Sicily instead in the first step toward conquering Italy.
Another deception was the non-existent ?army? commanded by Gen. George Patton in England. Fictional radio transmissions designed to be intercepted by Germans misled Hitler about when and where Europe would be invaded. Hitler?s commanders also bit on that one.
Since 9/11, U.S. intelligence has intercepted a blizzard of terrorist threats considered ?credible,? including newly discovered data in Pakistan suggesting attacks on financial districts of New York City, Washington, D.C., and northern New Jersey.
No threats have materialized, which understandably prompts questions.
Is the new threat genuine?
Or, have terrorists mastered the art of disinformation and kept the United States in perpetual anxiety with hoax cell phone calls and e-mails among themselves to be intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers?
Or, worse, as cynics ask, is the U.S. government engaged in exaggerating threats to keep the nation?s mind on terrorism to benefit President Bush in the November election?
Doubts went public when former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean questioned the timing and context of Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge?s threat announce-ment as a ?trump card? in President Bush?s re-election rhetoric. Dean pointed out the new threat data is three to four years old.
Ridge invited such doubts by saying, ?But we must understand that the kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror ...?
Unfortunately, it also was ?credible? evidence provided by ?slam dunk? U.S. intelligence of weapons of mass destruction that led Congress to quickly support the president?s pre-emptive attack on Iraq. ?Credible? evidence turned out to be not credi-ble.
Sadly, the only proof that threats are real, and the doubters wrong, would be a terrorist attack.
Until that occurs--God forbid--the nation must trust commander-in-chief George Bush to tell the truth.
