It's an election year. Bush is hovering at 40%. Run for your lives!

That's the message coming from Bush's announcement today of new details surrounding an alleged 2002 hijacking plot aimed at a skyscraper in Los Angeles.

There are many people out there, not just me, who believe that the Bush Administration deliberately allowed the 9/11/01 attacks to play out because the Bush presidency was being branded as over before it had hardly begun, and a blockbuster story was running in Newsweek about the paid thugs that were sent to Florida in 2000 to intimidate the vote-counters. The Project for the New American Century had long opined that another Pearl Harbor-type attack was necessary in order to gain support for the kind of Middle East empire-building that we've seen since the attacks.

So in trying to play once again on people's fears, did Bush indirectly admit that he is not above allowing terrorist attacks for political gain?

Decide for yourself:

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said Thursday he was blindsided by President Bush's announcement of new details on a purported 2002 hijacking plot aimed at a downtown skyscraper, and described communication with the White House as "nonexistent."

"I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor told The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president - but somebody."

Bush has referred to the 2002 plot before but he publicly filled in the details Thursday.

Bush said Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had begun planning an attack to fly a commercial airplane into the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast, the Library Tower in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower.

Instead of recruiting Arab hijackers, Southeast Asian men would be used, Bush said, because they were less likely to arouse suspicion. He said they would use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door.

The president said the plot was derailed when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al-Qaida operative. Bush did not name the country or the operative.

Think about it for a minute. We're supposed to believe that there was a credible threat to the city of Los Angeles in 2002, which means that the city is a potential target, and the mayor of that city was never briefed that such a thing had nearly occurred, not even before the president announced it to the entire world?

I realize that Villaraigosa was not mayor of Los Angeles at the time, but one would think that since he IS mayor now, he would have been briefed at some point that a threat of this type had existed and that continued vigilance is in order.

Unless either a) no such threat existed, and Rove just pulled it out of his ass because Bush is in some pretty deep shit right now and the only thing he has to work with is fear (in which case who's the REAL "terror"-ist?); or b) there is a policy in place in the Bush Administration to only notify the people they want to notify about such threats -- people like the executives of corporations headquartered in the World Trade Center who just happened to be at a big meeting in Nebraska on September 11, 2001 instead of in the building. Because otherwise what they're doing is issuing RETROACTIVE terror warnings -- warnings about threats that happened in the past -- and what possible motive could they have other than attempting to get more people willing to submit to constant government surveillance?

Because if a terrorist attack worked for them last time, why wouldn't it work for them again?

UPDATE (via Americablog): In 2004:

FBI Counterterrorism Official Said He Knew of No Thwarted Al Qaeda Attacks. After a CIA official claimed last year that the government had "probably prevented a few aviation attacks against both the East and West Coasts" since 9/11, John Pistole, the FBI's counterterrorism director, said he was "not sure what [the CIA] was referring to." - 9/11 Commission Testimony, 6/16/2004; New York Daily News, 6/17/04

So which is it? Was there a threat that the Administration didn't say anything to anyone about, in which case they planned to allow it to occur; or was Bush lying today?

Take yer pick.