TWO DAYS after President Bush declared Iraq "the central front in the war on terror," Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller announced that major terrorist attacks are possible this summer -- not from Iraq but from operatives of Al Qaeda who are already inside the United States.

"Disturbing evidence indicates Al Qaeda's specific intention to hit the United States hard," Ashcroft said in a news conference on Wednesday.

Ashcroft and Mueller could be right. But their presentation reminded the nation how much their boss has lied to the American people. In a news conference of nearly 4,000 words, Iraq did not come up once. Not one of the seven new suspects Ashcroft and Mueller named came from Iraq or has any publicized tie to Iraq. This is the way it has been ever since the Bush administration created its national threat level system in March 2002. On Sept. 10, 2002, on the eve of the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks that killed 3,000 people in the United States, the government raised the threat level from yellow "elevated" to orange "high." Ashcroft said: "Information indicates that Al Qaeda cells have been established in several South Asian countries in order to conduct car bomb and other attacks on US facilities."

Yet two days later, Bush went to the United Nations to say: "In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the technologies to kill on a massive scale. In one place, in one regime, we find all these dangers in their most lethal and aggressive forms. . . . Saddam Hussein's regime is a grave and gathering danger."

Bush said nothing about Al Qaeda cells in South Asia.

On Feb. 7, 2003, the government again raised the threat level from yellow to orange. Ashcroft said: "Recent reporting indicates an increased likelihood that Al Qaeda may attempt to attack Americans in the United States and/or abroad in or around the end of the Hajj, a Muslim religious period ending mid-February 2003. . . . The recent bombings of a night club in Bali, Indonesia, and of a resort hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, demonstrate the continued willingness of Al Qaeda to strike at peaceful innocent civilians."

There was no mention of any threat from Iraq. But two days later Bush said, "The issue facing our nation and the world is the extension of the war on terror to places like Iraq."

There was no mention in his speech of Bali or Mombasa. On March 17, 2003, the threat went back to orange on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said: "A large volume of reporting across a range of sources, some of which are highly reliable, indicates that Al Qaeda probably would attempt to launch terrorist attacks against US interests claiming they were defending Muslims or the Iraqi people rather than Saddam Hussein's regime."

Even on the eve of war, Ridge did not say the threat came from Iraq, only from operatives claiming sympathy to Iraq. Yet two days later (anyone detect a pattern here?) Bush announced the invasion to "defend the world from grave danger."

On May 20, 2003, after Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq, the government raised the threat back to orange. Undersecretary of Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson said: "The change is based upon the recent terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco." Hutchinson went on to say, "Al Qaeda remains the principal threat." There was no mention of Iraq.

But by the fall, President Bush was back at the United Nations saying that Iraq was "the central front in the war on terror."

On Dec. 21, 2003, the threat went back to orange because, Ridge said, "Al Qaeda's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland" around the holidays is "perhaps greater now than at any point since Sept. 11, 2001." You would have never known that from Bush himself. Just six days prior to the holiday alert, Vice President Dick Cheney told an audience in Mississippi, "Iraq is now the central front on the war on terror." At least 20 times since September of 2003, Bush and Cheney described Iraq in speeches and radio addresses as "the central front" in the war on terror.

This is after two years of think tank studies and in-depth journalism that has found no link between Saddam Hussein and 9/11 nor that Iraq, still decimated from the 1991 Gulf War, was of any imminent threat to anyone.

Terrorist alerts about Al Qaeda may not be a lie. There is no question the alarming rhetoric on Iraq was. One shudders to think what Bush's deception has already cost in the lives of American soldiers, Iraqi civilians, and billions of dollars lost to our economy. Let us hope that we will not shudder again over the possibility that keeping 138,000 troops in Iraq on a wild goose chase lets the real terrorists slip into the nation once again.

© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.

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