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daimyo
Monticello

Registered: 05/13/04
Posts: 7,751
Last seen: 12 years, 2 months

Bush Saved Los Angeles From Terrorist Attack

#5282841 - 02/09/06 06:22 PM (18 years, 2 months ago)

Article
BY RON HUTCHESON

WASHINGTON - The plot envisioned a ghastly replay of the attack that brought down the World Trade Center, only this time the terrorists wanted to crash a plane into the tallest building in Los Angeles. The plan unraveled in early 2002 with the arrest of one of the ringleaders, but President Bush provided new details about it Thursday in defending his handling of the war on terrorism.

The timing of his chilling disclosures, four years after the plot was discovered and four months after he first discussed the broad outlines of the scheme, raised suspicion that his remarks were politically motivated. At the very moment that Bush was defending his aggressive approach to terrorism, two of his top advisers were trying to quell a revolt in Congress against his domestic eavesdropping program.

Bowing to bipartisan pressure, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Gen. Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, gave a closed-door briefing on the surveillance program to members of the Senate Intelligence Committee. The warrantless surveillance, which the president authorized without congressional or court approval shortly after the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, targets communications between suspected terrorists overseas and their contacts in the United States.

The session, conducted a day after a similar briefing for members of the House Intelligence Committee, failed to resolve doubts about the program's legality. Committee Democrats and at least one Republican, Sen. Mike DeWine of Ohio, said they wanted more information.

"If they came with the idea that this was going to stop an investigation on the part of the Senate Intelligence Committee, they were wrong," Sen. John "Jay" Rockefeller of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the panel, said after the meeting.

Bush and his advisers said the Los Angeles plot illustrated the need to move swiftly against any suspicious activity.

"It took the combined efforts of several countries to break up this plot," the president told members of the National Guard Association. "By working together, we stopped a catastrophic attack on our homeland."

As described by Bush and Frances Townsend, his top counterterrorism adviser, the plot grew out of early planning for the Sept. 11 attacks, when al-Qaida leaders considered simultaneous assaults on both coasts. They scrapped that idea but quickly began work on an encore attack on the 73-story Library Tower, a gleaming, granite-and-glass edifice now known as the US Bank Tower. (In the 1996 movie "Independence Day," aliens destroy the 1,018-foot-tall building.)

"We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks - had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door," Bush said.

According to administration officials, Mohammed, fearing that Arab terrorists would generate suspicion, recruited a four-man terrorist cell through Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamic terrorist group in Indonesia. The four operatives were sent to Afghanistan, where they pledged their loyalty to al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden in an oath known as a biat.

Townsend said intelligence officials weren't sure whether the meeting occurred shortly before or sometime after the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, which sent bin Laden into hiding. Also unclear is how close the plotters were to executing their scheme when the cell leader was arrested in an undisclosed country in February 2002. Townsend refused to discuss whether electronic surveillance played any role.

Townsend said all four cell members were currently in custody, but she declined to identify them, to say where they were arrested or to disclose where they are being held. The plotters didn't include Richard Reid, the would-be shoe bomber who was arrested in December 2001 on a flight from Paris to Miami.

Although Reid had been trained in the same bombing technique that the plotters planned to use, intelligence officials don't know whether Reid had any contact with them, Townsend said.

In a conference call with reporters, Townsend took issue with suggestions that the White House had released new details about the plot to help deal with the controversy over domestic eavesdropping. Bush first mentioned the Los Angeles plot in vague terms in a speech last October as one of the administration's successes in the war on terrorism.

"The problem is you can't share these details when you have operational leads," she said. "It takes time."

--------------------
"I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man."

Edited by daimyo (02/09/06 06:33 PM)

Extras:

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