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| Intel other than Khan's data involved in decision to raise terror alert |
| 2004-08-04 |
| Senior government officials said Tuesday that new intelligence pointing to a threat of a terrorist attack on financial targets in New York and possibly in Washington was a major factor in the decision to raise the terrorism alert level over the weekend. The information was not limited to surveillance of specific buildings over the years. The officials said the separate stream of intelligence, which they had not previously disclosed, reached the White House only late last week. It was part of a flow that officials said had prompted them to act urgently in the past few days. The officials disclosed the information a day after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that much of the surveillance activity cited this weekend to justify the latest warnings had been at least 3 years old. At the same time, the White House offered a vigorous defense of its decision to heighten the terror alert in New York, Newark, N.J., and Washington, with officials saying there is still good reason for alarm. "I think it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that it was based on old information," White House spokesman Scott McClellan said of the heightened warning. In an appearance in New York, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge responded to questions about whether election-year politics had played a part in determining how and when the intelligence was released. "We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security," Ridge said. "The detail, the sophistication, the thoroughness of this information, if you had access to it, you'd say we did the right thing. Government should let the public know about situations like this. It's not about politics. It's about confidence in government telling you when they get the information." In addition to the surveillance activity, detailed in case reports uncovered late last week from computer disks in Pakistan, a senior intelligence official said "very current and recent activity on the part of al-Qaida" has left little doubt that "al-Qaida is moving toward the execution stage of attacks here in the homeland." Among other things, one official disclosed Tuesday that one recent intelligence report pointed to a possible attack "in August or September." That shifting tone might prove frustrating to the public, providing little guide to assessing the gravity of threat information whose details remain shrouded in intelligence reports not available to anyone outside the highest ranks of government. A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise offensive intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations, but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot. But senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials also described the intelligence as important. They said it had reached the White House last Friday, and strongly reinforced the sense of alarm prompted by the separate flow of information that was arriving at the same time through the CIA from Pakistan, and that it was based on information culled from seized computer disks that contained detailed case reports of reconnaissance conducted on buildings in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in 2000 and 2001. In providing new details about those case reports, senior government officials described them as discrete documents, each at least 20 pages long and devoted to a particular target. Perhaps most intriguing, they said, was that the reports were written in "perfect English." The author of the reports was "obviously someone who has lived an extensive period of time in the West, exceptionally professional, exceptionally meticulous," a senior intelligence official said. "Anyone who thinks that these terrorists are a bunch of ne'er-do-wells, if 9/11 didn't convince them, these case reports would convince them." Though the case reports do appear to have been completed prior to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, as Bush administration officials first acknowledged Monday, some of the computer files appear to have been updated or accessed more recently, including a computer file containing a photograph of a building that had been modified in January of this year, a senior White House official said. The official also said there was reason to believe that people associated with al-Qaida who are still at large would have had access to the reports. The officials also acknowledged that they have not been able to assess the significance of the fact that the computer file had been modified. Such a modification could have meant that the file was updated with newly taken surveillance photographs, but might simply have meant that the file had recently been opened and closed. The White House officials spoke in a lengthy interview arranged at the request of The New York Times. The computer disks containing the case reports were linked to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer who was arrested by Pakistani authorities July 13, American officials confirmed. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #3 and we RB'ers considers him a saint |
| Posted by: Frank G 2004-08-04 9:56:51 PM |
| #2 A4021-- YES |
| Posted by: Wuzzalib 2004-08-04 9:08:28 PM |
| #1 OT, noob question. Is Dan Darling the dude that is now interning with some *evil* neo-con thinktank? I think I saw the infopost on windsofchange? Yes/no? |
| Posted by: Anonymous4021 2004-08-04 4:28:10 PM |