Paging Dr. Dean

In my last post I criticized the misplaced media carping over the intel that just bumped the country up to "orange" again. I also slammed Howard Dean for the baseless allegation that the move to orange was a political ploy. Friday saw this story from Reuters, which begins:

Al Qaeda member Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan e-mailed contacts in Osama bin Laden's network while in custody as part of a sting operation by security agencies, a Pakistani intelligence source said Friday.

A series of arrests in Britain this week resulted from Khan's capture in Pakistan early last month.

A high alert for U.S. financial institutions against a possible al Qaeda attack was also prompted by information gathered from the Pakistani computer engineer, according to intelligence and government sources.

If true, this is just confirming what I wrote last week, i.e. it wasn't just old data.

For its part, the New York Times is already slithering away from the "old data / political motivation" thesis, so this editorial position August 3rd:

The Times reports today that much of the information that led to the heightened alert is actually three or four years old and that authorities had found no concrete evidence that a terror plot was actually under way. This news does nothing to bolster the confidence Americans need that the administration is not using intelligence for political gain.

morphed into this new stance only two days later:

The administration was obviously right to warn the country that Al Qaeda had apparently studied financial institutions in three cities with the idea of a possible attack.

So while the editorial board of the Times bends itself into pretzels trying to craft a consistent position out of their silly reporting and Howard Dean's crackpot allegations, this Reuters story swings in like a wrecking ball.

Was there no-one on the Times editorial board able to foresee how shaky that position was? Is their perception of the world that skewed?