Alerts need credibility.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Tom Ridge walks a knife-edged path between alarmism and complacency. As secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, he's supposed to warn the country of threats of terrorist attacks. If an attack does not occur, he'll be accused of crying wolf or worse. If an attack were to occur, he'd be accused of having failed to issue a sufficiently urgent wolf alert.

This week, Ridge warned of al-Qaeda plots against targets in New York City, New Jersey and Washington, D.C. The orange alert, it turned out, was based on intelligence that was as much as four years old. Faced with widespread doubts that an elevated terror warning was warranted, the Bush administration claimed Tuesday that more recent intelligence had added credibility to the earlier reports.

It's impossible for anyone who hasn't seen the source material to judge whether a tightening of security measures was justified. Yet al-Qaeda is known to spend years in planning its operations - according to the 9/11 Commission Report, the genesis of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks can be traced back as far as 1993. It's also know that the alert was based on information obtained from a man who took part in al-Qaeda's 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Knowing these things - and having been briefed by intelligence agencies - Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry refused to second-guess Ridge. But that didn't deter others from speculating that the terror alert had been timed for President Bush's political benefit.

Ridge fed these speculations when he announced the alert Sunday: "The kind of information available to us today is the result of the president's leadership in the war against terrorism," the secretary said. By Tuesday he was insisting that "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security." Ridge can't have it both ways, crediting Bush and then denying that his words have any political content.

Ridge was clearly clumsy, but clumsiness is probably all it was. The notion that the Bush administration would deliberately manipulate terror warnings for political purposes implies a cynicism too profound even for today's hyper-partisan climate. Acting in such a way would not only be cynical, it would be stupid - the Bush administration draws great political advantages from its conduct of the fight against terrorism, and that political asset would be devalued if it were misused.

Yet the question remains: What should the government do when it receives information indicating a risk of a terrorist attack? In general, it should share information with the public. There will unavoidably be false alarms. Far worse, however, would be an attack for which no alarm was sounded. The government would then be justly accused of withholding information that might have saved lives.

One danger is that each alarm devalues the next - after a while, people will stop paying attention to them. This is already happening. Maintaining the credibility of terror alerts will be a continuing challenge. Ridge and others can start by avoiding words that fuel suspicions that the alerts have a political purpose. Providing as much detail as possible about the information on which warnings are based would also be helpful. And it's time to drop the color-coded alert system, and instead acknowledge that varied and specific threats require varied and specific responses.

The American people, for their part, need to resist fatigue. Ridge, just like whoever would follow him in a Kerry administration, will occasionally warn of dangers that do not materialize. But the dangers are nonetheless real, and ignoring them won't make them go away.