Of course members of Congress use the terror warnings to attempt to advance their own agendas!

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First Thoughts: The Politics of Terror
NBC News Political Unit, August 5, 2013

Terror politics return. Washington and the government is still consumed today with this yet-undefined terror plot that’s now closed at least 19 U.S. embassies in the Middle East and Africa through Saturday, August 10. There isn’t a government official who’s seen some form of this intelligence who isn’t spooked by it. The threat is from AQAP (al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, aka Yemen) but officials have been careful not to identify what kind of plot they think they’ve stumbled on. Essentially, just about every member of the country’s national security apparatus has called this warning the most dire since before the president took office in 2009. On NBC’s “Meet The Press,” Senate Intelligence Ranking Member Saxby Chambliss (R-GA) called the chatter “very reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.” It was interesting to watch the weekend chatter and see many members of Congress and others use the terror warnings to advance their own agendas.  Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CNN that the new threats were evidence of why the phone surveillance program was needed. "To members of the Congress who want to reform the NSA program, great,” said Graham. But if you want to gut it, you make us much less safe and you’re putting our nation at risk.” Former PA Sen. Rick Santorum, who admitted he was eyeing another presidential bid, saw the warning as another chance to bring up the administration’s failures in last year’s attack on the Libyan consulate. “This is to me a direct response to what we saw in Benghazi and the general program the administration has which is not being aggressive.” A few questions we don’t have the answers to -- Did the administration go public because they didn’t know specifics, so CYA (over) learning the lessons from Benghazi? Was this about using tactics from the Bush era, which was, go public and hope it breaks up the plot, scares the terrorists off for a time? Or something else?  Either way, no one, left or right, appears to be criticizing the Obama administration’s extra caution.
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