No, 9/11 was not an inside job (but BUSH KNEW!), but inaugural Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge just wrote a bitchy tell-all, and he makes some crazy claims.

Ridge was never invited to sit in on National Security Council meetings; was "blindsided" by the FBI in morning Oval Office meetings because the agency withheld critical information from him; found his urgings to block Michael Brown from being named head of the emergency agency blamed for the Hurricane Katrina disaster ignored; and was pushed to raise the security alert on the eve of President Bush's re-election, something he saw as politically motivated and worth resigning over.

Come on, Tom. Michael Brown was just a symptom of an administration too concerned with exaggerated foreign threats to give a shit about domestic emergency preparedness and too opposed to career civil service to staff FEMA with people who knew what they were doing. He was not actually personally responsible for Katrina, and unless Tom's claiming that Brown's presence alone was the reason why Ridge, as head of the department in charge of FEMA, never bothered to make emergency response a departmental priority that "revelation" is just long-after-the-fact ass-covering.

Oh, but the other thing, about changing the terror alert right before the 2004 election? We believe that one.