EDITOR'S LETTER

Politicizing Terror

When terrorists set off four bombs in Central London on July 7, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised its color-coded alert level to orange for America's mass-transit systems. The last time the terrorist alert had been raised from yellow to orange was in August 2004, just three months before the presidential election. It stayed orange until November 10, eight days after the presidential election. Skeptics who believed this alert was politically motivated—that is to say convenient for the president—had cause for suspicion. It would seem to have been a safe political bet that voters all weirded out by alarms of impending attack would be much more inclined to retain a sitting president— especially a self-described "war" president—than an untested combatant. And, as we know, the bet paid off.

Former Homeland Security czar Tom Ridge remained the dutiful Bush & Co. team player throughout his tenure. Once he left the organization, however, he became increasingly forthcoming. "More often than not," he told USA Today earlier this year, "we were the least inclined to raise [the alert level]. Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment.... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?'"

The heightened alert that truly raised eyebrows was last August's, when financial institutions in New York, Washington, and Newark, New Jersey, were pinpointed as the targets of supposed alQaeda threats. This certainly got people who work in those buildings all jiggy. The orange alert came just three days after the Democratic convention, conveniently brushing news of it to the inside pages of most newspapers. And it came the day before First Lady Laura Bush and her twin daughters were scheduled to drop by the Citigroup building in New York, one of the structures specifically mentioned in the alert. The visit, not surprisingly, went off without incident. Do you really think a president would put his wife and daughters in harm's way, even during the final leg of an election? As expected, the front pages of many U.S. newspapers the next day ran photographs of the Bush ladies braving the dangers of Orangeville, and American voters were left with the sort of image Britons had of the Queen Mother when she visited London's East End as it was being leveled during the German Blitz of World War II. Never let it be said that Laura Bush is not the president's chief asset.

In this issue, Michael Wolff tackles the growing hoo-ha over Bush's second-greatest asset, Karl Rove. The scandal, known variously as Rovegate, Leakgate, or C.I.A.-gate, is proving to be a political whodunit in search of a catchy title and a third act. The Bush White House has a warranted reputation for riding out this sort of scandal. But in the White House pressroom, normally a placid pond of approval-seeking koi fish, there are traces of blood in the water.

Because the plotline of this drama is relatively simple, and because the story actually involves journalists, the Washington press corps appears to be on the hunt. Did Rove or his colleagues illegally out Valerie Plame to reporters as a covert C.I.A. operative in order to exact revenge on her husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson? Wilson had run afoul of Rove after he undercut a cornerstone of the administration's rationale for going to war against Iraq by debunking the White House's claim that Saddam Hussein had attempted to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. The Justice Departmentappointed prosecutor looking into the matter has sent one journalist to jail for not telling him who told her about Plame. (This is Judith Miller of The New York Times, in the Joan of Arc role of a lifetime.) Time's White House correspondent Matt Cooper, who was willing to make a similar stand, had his position complicated when his boss, Time Inc. editor in chief Norman Pearlstine, decided that the company was not above the law and therefore cooperated with the prosecutor, handing over Cooper's notes. Wolff takes the position Why should a journalist go to jail to protect Karl Rove? And he makes a pretty convincing meal of it.

The rub in the relationship between the major news businesses and Washington is that 30-plus years ago—when the press was defying the government by publishing the Pentagon Papers, or running the Nixon administration to ground during Watergate—the three networks and their news divisions, along with Time Inc., were by today's standards owned by mom-and-pop operations. Now they are all minor cogs in the machinery of far-flung entertainment complexes that often rely on federal permission to complete their extensive growth plans.

The owners of these media properties bask in the glow of prestige such jewels give off. And their quality helps raise other ships in the corporate armada—the big-time media equivalent of the articles in Playboy. This being the case, the people who own these assets, which in a democracy virtually amount to public trusts, should realize that standing up for the principles of those assets—journalists' being allowed to protect their sources, for one—is not just a cost of doing business. In the long run, it is good business. GRAYDON CARTER