NEW YORK, 4 August 2004 — Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge defended his administration’s decision to raise the terror alert, but added there was no evidence of recent surveillance by Al-Qaeda operatives.
Speaking here yesterday, he also defending charges over the Bush administration’s decision to raise the alert immediately following the Democratic Convention, saying: “This is not about politics. This is about good government.”
His announcement follows Monday’s news that much of the information about Al-Qaeda’s surveillance of five financial institutions that led to a new terrorism alert Sunday was collected before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Ridge announced the threats Sunday and raised the terrorism threat level for financial institutions in New York City, Washington and Newark, New Jersey to code orange, or “high,” saying Al Qaeda had been looking for ways to detonate car or truck bombs at the facilities. The heightened alert — the first time it had been applied on a localized basis rather than nationwide — initiated heightened security measures in the three cities.
“There is nothing right now that we’re hearing that is new,” one senior law enforcement official, briefed on the alert, told journalists anonymously. “Why did we go to this level? ...I still don’t know that.”
Many administration officials insisted Monday that even three-year-old intelligence, when coupled with other information about Al-Qaeda’s plans to attack the United States, justified the massive security response in the three cities.
“You can’t tell from the intelligence itself whether or not those individuals (who amassed it) are still here,” Frances Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on PBS’ “News Hour With Jim Lehrer.” She said among the details Al-Qaeda agents scrutinized were positions of security cameras, movement of traffic and what kind of explosives would destroy the target buildings intelligence.
US officials said Monday that the Al-Qaeda surveillance files were found in the possession of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, 25, an Al-Qaeda computer expert who was arrested in Pakistan in mid-July.
Khan was allegedly caught with sketches, maps and about 500 diagrams of buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington. Officials said Khan’s capture by Pakistani authorities had provided investigators with a wealth of information.
Several officials also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist operatives about the buildings was obtained through the Internet or other “open sources” available to the general public, including some floor plans.
“You’ve got the Republican convention coming up, the Olympics, the elections...I think there was a feeling that we should err on the side of caution even if it’s not clear that anything is new,” a counter-terrorism official told the media on background.
“It’s serious business. I mean, we wouldn’t be, you know, contacting authorities at the local level unless something was real,” President Bush said Monday at a White House news conference announcing his proposed intelligence reforms. He said the alert shows “there’s an enemy which hates what we stand for.”
