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Bush makes public non existant 2002 terror plot { February 10 2006 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10bush.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/10/politics/10bush.html
February 10, 2006
Bush Gives New Details of 2002 Qaeda Plot to Attack Los Angeles
By ELISABETH BUMILLER and DAVID JOHNSTON
WASHINGTON, Feb. 9 — President Bush offered new information on Thursday about what he said was a foiled plot by Al Qaeda in 2002 to fly a hijacked airplane into the tallest building west of the Mississippi, the U.S. Bank Tower in Los Angeles, as he sought to make the case for his record on national security.
Although the administration made public the Los Angeles plot in general terms four months ago, Mr. Bush, in a speech to the National Guard Association, disclosed more specific details, including what he said was the planned use of a "shoe bomb" by hijackers to breach the airplane's cockpit door and take over the controls.
In addition, Mr. Bush and one of his counterterrorism advisers said that four extremists were recruited from Southeast Asia to carry out the plan, that their leader received training in shoe bombs and that all four had traveled to an undisclosed place after the Sept. 11 attacks to meet with Osama bin Laden and pledge their loyalty to Al Qaeda.
Mr. Bush and White House officials gave no reason for releasing details of a plot that they first disclosed last October. But Mr. Bush's speech came at a time when Republicans are intent on establishing their record on national security as the pre-eminent issue in the 2006 midterm elections, and when the president is facing questions from members of both parties about a secret eavesdropping program that he describes as pivotal to the war on terrorism.
In his speech, Mr. Bush said the plot had been "derailed in early 2002, when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key Al Qaeda operative." He added that "subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target and how Al Qaeda hoped to execute it."
Mr. Bush and his counterterrorism adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, made no claim on Thursday that the eavesdropping program, conducted by the National Security Agency, had helped to foil the 2002 plot. But in a conference call with reporters, Ms. Townsend did not rule out the program as a factor in discovering the plan.
"We use all available sources and methods in the intelligence community, but we have to protect them," Ms. Townsend said. "So I'm not going to talk about what ones we did or didn't use in this particular case."
She added that the Los Angeles plot had grown out of the Sept. 11 attacks. As described in the staff report by the independent commission that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who is said to be the mastermind behind them, had originally envisioned an elaborate plan with 10 planes that would attack the East and West Coasts simultaneously on Sept. 11, 2001. But Mr. bin Laden rejected the plan, the report said, because of its difficulty.
"It was bin Laden who decided that it should just focus on the East Coast, and the West Coast should be held in abeyance until there was a follow-on attack," Ms. Townsend told reporters. "It's our understanding now that it was too difficult to get enough operatives for both the East and West Coast plots at the same time."
Weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Ms. Townsend said, Mr. Mohammed turned his attention to the West Coast and to recruits from Southeast Asia affiliated with Jemaah Islamiyah, a Qaeda offshoot with roots in Indonesia.
Working with another terror figure, Riduan Isamuddin, better known as Hambali, Mr. Mohammed recruited a cell leader and three other men in October 2001, Ms. Townsend said. Mr. Mohammed trained the leader of the group in building a shoe bomb, similar to the device recovered from Richard Reid, who had tried to set off a bomb in his shoe on an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami in December 2001.
Significantly, each of the four men, whom Ms. Townsend would not identify, were found to have traveled to Afghanistan to meet with Mr. bin Laden in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks. Each pledged loyalty to him, she said. Such pledges were a significant gesture in the bin Laden network and usually a prerequisite to carrying out an attack.
Ms. Townsend said that American counterterrorism officials, working with four other regional governments, which she would not identify, arrested the cell leader and three others in February 2002. The plot was effectively extinguished.
Several American counterterrorism officials said Thursday that, at the time the plot was broken up in early 2002, the authorities believed that they had disrupted an active terrorist planning effort, but that they possessed only fragmentary evidence and were unsure whether the threat was significant.
Only later did they conclude that the plot was genuine and potentially serious. The outline of the plot became clear, the officials said, primarily through the interrogations of captured Qaeda figures like Mr. Mohammed, who was apprehended in March 2003, and Hambali, captured in August 2003.
In Los Angeles, the office of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa said that the White House on Wednesday had given them a heads up about the president's disclosure but said that the mayor was not personally informed.
"I would have expected a direct call from the White House," the mayor said at an afternoon news conference.
In his remarks, Mr. Bush referred to the West Coast target as "the Liberty Tower," but White House officials said he had meant to say Library Tower, the name of the U.S. Bank Tower in 2002. The building, completed in 1989, is 1,018 feet tall and was "destroyed" by alien invaders in the 1996 movie "Independence Day."
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
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