United States officials last week insisted they were right to raise the alert over a potential terrorist attack against a US financial target, despite the fact that much of the information that prompted the warning was years old.
Amid claims of political motives in the handling of the alert, a senior Bush administration official told The New York Times that the cache of al-Qaeda surveillance material captured in Pakistan contained photographs taken last January of financial centres in New York and Washington.
Earlier, Tom Ridge, the Secretary of Homeland Security, conceded that almost all the evidence found on computer files seized recently in Pakistan pointed to al-Qaeda surveillance of key financial establishments that pre-dated September 11 2001.
He said that some of the information had been updated as recently as January, but added there was “no evidence” of more recent surveillance. That did not mean there was no imminent threat, he argued, because of al-Qaeda’s reputation for long-term planning.
“I would point out that this is the most significant, detailed piece of information about any particular region that we’ve come across in a long, long time, perhaps ever,” he said.
The Washington Post on Tuesday quoted a “senior law enforcement official” as questioning the motivation behind the alert declared on Sunday of a possible attack on financial centres in New York, Newark and Washington.
“There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that is new,” the official said. “Why did we go to this level?”
The US Department of Homeland Security has often been accused of crying wolf for raising the alert after overhearing “chatter” on the terrorist grapevine. This time, however, the US authorities really believe they have caught a rare glimpse of the wolf at work — an al-Qaeda operation in preparation.
The high alert was the most specific to date, and it marks the first time this year that the colour-coded alert status has been raised to orange (high).
It is also the first time that the homeland security department has named specific buildings as possible al-Qaeda targets.
Ridge rejected suggestions that the high alert was politically motivated. “We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,” he said.
His claim that there was no evidence of recent surveillance directly contradicted an earlier intelligence briefing to reporters suggesting the surveillance of targets “probably continues even today”.
A US intelligence official stuck by that claim. “There is reason to believe it [the surveillance] continues,” the official said, adding that evidence for al-Qaeda preparations came from many sources.
“There are multiple streams of reporting discussing potential attacks. The information at the briefing [on the Pakistan findings] is just another piece of puzzle that fits into streams of reporting,” the official said.
“Some of the information is pre-9/11, but remember that with the [Kenya and Tanzania] embassy bombings in 1998, the casing of the embassies took place in 1993 and it was approved in 1994 by [Osama] bin Laden, and the attack only happened in 1998. This is a very methodical, patient organisation.”
According to a former senior CIA official, some of the corroborating evidence came from British intelligence, who had captured an al-Qaeda suspect who claimed that an attack would take place in the US two months before the US presidential election.
That would coincide with the Republican convention in New York at the end of August and the beginning of September.
The alerts were triggered by the arrests of the al-Qaeda computer expert, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, and Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted for the 1998 bombings in East Africa. — Â