Front-paged at BoomanTribune.com."In November," reports Salon's War Room, "[Michael] Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a piece for Newsweek in which they said that U.S. law enforcement officials were extremely concerned about 'evidence regarding possible active Al Qaeda plots to attack targets in Britain'."
How worried were law enforcement types? This worried:
"According to a U.S. government official," Isikoff and Hosenball wrote, "fears of terror attacks have prompted FBI agents based in the U.S. Embassy in London to avoid traveling on London's popular underground railway (or tube) system, which is used daily by millions of commuters.
While embassy-based officers of the U.S. Secret Service, Immigration and Customs bureaus and the CIA still are believed to use the underground to go about their business, FBI agents have been known to turn up late to cross-town meetings because they insist on using taxis in London's traffic-choked business center."
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Although the anecdote about the FBI avoiding London's subways is what poker players would call a "tell," there are even more serious charges in the
Newsweek article, including -- in the offices of Homeland Security -- irresponsibility and political fiddling with terror threats, all under the helpful watch of the White House. And all designed to cripple John Kerry's campaign.
So, what did the FBI know last winter?
Check out the title, subtitle and opening paragraph of Isikoff's Nov. 2004 piece:
"The Real Target?
New intelligence suggests that Al Qaeda was planning to attack London, not U.S. financial centers, in the run-up to the presidential election. A Kerry adviser blames politics for the timing of the government's summer alert."Nov. 17 - The latest analysis of evidence that led to last summer's Code Orange alert suggests that Al Qaeda operatives were plotting a "big bomb" attack against a major landmark in Britain--but had no active plans for strikes in the United States, U.S. intelligence sources tell NEWSWEEK.
More lies:
The reassessment of Al Qaeda plans is the latest indication that much of the Bush administration's repeatedly voiced concerns about a pre-election attack inside the United States was based in part on an early misreading of crucial intelligence seized months ago in Pakistan.
The new view is that there was indeed an active Al Qaeda plot underway earlier this year--one that involved coded communications between high-level operatives in Pakistan and a British cell headed by a longtime associate of September 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed.
The plot was aimed at setting off a large bomb at a prestigious economic or political target inside the United Kingdom--in effect to make a political statement against the British government. ...
But little, if any, any evidence has turned up suggesting that the plotters had taken any steps to attack U.S. financial targets as Bush administration officials had initially suggested. The failure to find any such evidence was a key reason the Department of Homeland Security last week relaxed the terror alert and downgraded the threat level. ...
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge first announced the financial-buildings alert on Sunday, Aug. 1, just three days after Sen. John Kerry gave his acceptance speech at the Democratic Party convention in Boston. Ridge's references to what he called "very specific" and "alarming" intelligence about Al Qaeda surveillance of such buildings as the World Bank in Washington and the New York Stock Exchange set off a new wave of fears about a possibly imminent terrorist attack and, in the view of some, had the effect of substantially suppressing Kerry's "bounce" in the polls. ...
From The Real Target?
Isikoff learned that "the alleged plotters' plans for possible action in Britain were very elaborate and flexible." What this tells me is that the bombers were an equal-opportunity lot. They were casing out whichever high-profile target in London would be the easiest and bloodiest.
The Newsweek article concludes with the description of yet another Bush administration trumped-up terror alert:
The indications that plotters linked to a big election-season terror alert actually were actively planning to attack Britain rather than the United States is at least the second revelation which seems to partly undermine administration assertions that the U.S. homeland faced a heightened risk of attack during the presidential campaign.
Shortly before the election, administration officials quietly acknowledged that at least one informant who last winter had provided lurid intelligence about a possible pre-election attack in the U.S. had apparently fabricated his allegations. Yet given the importance that waging the war on terror had assumed during the presidential campaign, administration officials apparently were reluctant to announce a lowering of the Orange-alert threat until after the election. "They would have been a laughing stock if they lowered it before the election," says Beers. Still, many U.S. officials think the threat of possible Al Qaeda attacks remains relatively high—at least until after George W. Bush's second Inauguration in January.
P.S. And cheers to more prescient reporting from Newsweek which, four weeks before the Iraq invasion -- as Ray McGovern famously reminded us recently -- stated that Saddam's runaway son-in-law Hussein Kamel assured questioners that WMDs had long ago been destroyed in Iraq. ("Former CIA Analyst Blasts WaPo Editorial Staff," BooMan Tribune).
Thanks to Lisa Pease for pointing out the Salon article (Sub. required).