Tom Ridge: Terror alert 'process worked'

by Mark Silva

This could either be a case of an overzealous publisher promoting a book, or a contrite author backpedaling from the written word once he's seen the reaction to it.

Whatever it is, Tom Ridge, former secretary of Homeland Security and governor of Pennsylvania, says people have been ''hyperventilating'' about his published contention that he faced political pressure during the final days of President George W. Bush's first term to raise the national terrorism alert. It wasn't raised.

"A consensus was reached. We didn't go up. The process worked," Ridge said itoday in ann interview on ABC's Good Morning America.

This is a decidedly different tone than the one set by the pre-release excerpts from The Test of Our Times: America Under Siege, which Ridge's publisher circulated for a book coming out in September. And Ridge did not retract that story line today.

"An election-eve drama was being played out at the highest levels of our government" after Osama bin Laden released a pre-election message critical of President Bush,'' he writes of feeling pressure from other Cabinet members, Defense's Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, to raise the terror alert. "We weren't seeing any additional intelligence that justified it. In fact, we were incredulous,'' he writes, according to the publisher's promotional release. "I wondered, 'Is this about security or politics?'''

Rumsfeld has called the claim "nonsense'' -- and a book-selling ploy. Ridge said today that there had been a lively debate about the alert level, but it was not raised and thus not an issue. Ridge said his concern at the time was to be "absolutely certain" that divergent points of view were heard and that people had their say.

Ridge, a Republican whom Sen. John McCain considered as a potential running mate last year, also says he agrees with former Vice President Dick Cheney's criticism of the Obama administration's review of terrorism-era detainee interrogation practices during the Bush administraiton. It "would be criminal,''Ridge said, for the new administration to prosecute people who likely believed they were acting within the law.

Cheney said Sunday that the new administration's stance "offends the hell out of me,'' which has generated considerably more conversation than Ridge's ruckus.