Bush Details 2002 Plot to Attack L.A. Tower
Intelligence Officials Play Down Importance of Case, Attribute Remarks to Politics
By Peter Baker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, February 10, 2006; Page A04
President Bush, under pressure from Congress, defended his campaign against terrorism yesterday, offering for the first time a vivid account of a foiled al Qaeda plot to strike the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, by crashing a hijacked commercial airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper.
Bush said four Southeast Asians who met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in October 2001 were taught how to use shoe bombs to blow open a cockpit door and steer a plane into the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. The four were captured by Asian authorities before they could execute the plan, he said.
Declaring that "America remains at risk," Bush cited the episode as an example of international cooperation against terrorism, and cautioned against complacency. "We cannot let the fact that America hasn't been attacked in four and a half years since September 11, 2001, lull us into the illusion that the threats to our nation have disappeared. They have not."
The reported West Coast plot had been disclosed before but never in as much detail. The president's speech came on the same day as a Senate hearing into the Bush-ordered warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail by Americans and their contacts overseas, but aides said his comments were not related to the dispute over the program.
White House officials, who were unwilling to publicly disclose details of the alleged plot as recently as last fall, said they decided in the past three weeks to declassify the case so that Bush could have an example to provide the public.
But several U.S. intelligence officials played down the relative importance of the alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush's speech to politics. The officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to publicly criticize the White House, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk.
washingtonpost.com
Ok, so the two justifications of Bush's domestic spying program, this one and the plot to take the Brooklyn Bridge apart with blow torches, apparently were nothing more than idle talk. Wow. Makes you feel all safe, now doesn't it? Well worth anything to feel this way... |
