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Al-Qaeda strategy is cause for alert
They scouted the streets. They took photographs. They wrote detailed surveillance reports. And then, after five years of patiently waiting, Al Qaeda operatives carried out the devastating suicide truck bombing at the American Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, in August 1998, killing more than 200 people and injuring thousands.This meticulous approach to terrorism - studying targets and fine-tuning strategies for years before an attack - is in part why officials in Washington say they are so alarmed about the latest evidence of reconnaissance of financial centers in New York, New Jersey and Washington, even though much of the information dates back to the days before Sept. 11, 2001. The same studied technique has been central to the most well-known Qaeda attacks, be they in Africa or the United States. Plots that were carried out and failed, and even plots that were considered but abandoned, like a possible attack on the Brooklyn Bridge last year, each demonstrate this same obsession. It is Al Qaeda's hallmark. "Al Qaeda will wait years to act and decades to succeed," Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the federal prosecutor who has been investigating Osama bin Laden for about a decade, told the 9/11 commission this summer. Investigators also know that even after extensively considering and then dismissing a possible target, the terrorists have simply switched their focus to another location, which may explain the intense precautions imposed around the Capitol this week, even though it is not publicly known whether it was among the buildings that were subjected to surveillance. Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-08-05 |
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