Yes, a threat exists. We've known that for several years, predating 911.

Question is, does an Imminent Threat exist, such that it requires this sort of Immediate Response?

Thus far, we have no information to suggest that it does. We have no timeline, no actual Operational Plan that we know about, no one in place to do anything -- just some really old information that some buildings were scouted, and exactly the same level of Threat Assessment we had at least two years ago when this exact same threat to the NY Financial District was discussed.

There's a Threat everywhere.

What immediate actions are justified?

Answer: High profile mediagenic actions as close as possible to the national headquarters of News Media.

Downtown Manhattan tends to see itself as the center of the Universe. It tries to sell that vision of itself to the rest of the country.

It isn't.

Well, we know after Iraq how low a threshold the Bush administration has for declaring an "immenent threat".

Can someone PLEASE remove one of America's greatest threats?

Just take him somewhere and Do A Jimmy Hoffa!

He should NEVER be HEARD FROM AGAIN. Do whatever you choose, we don't care.

Who ? Isn't it obvious? He used to be a North
Eastern U.S. Flaky Liberal governor.

Check this additional story out which indicates attack was to occur in Sept according to British sources. Who knows anymore?

Ron

*****

NEWSDAY

http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/ny-usterr033916365aug03,0,2200894,print.story?coll=ny-nationalnews-headlines

Moderator's Note: Hat Tip to Instapundit

*****

Source: Terror attack to be in early September


BY KNUT ROYCE
WASHINGTON BUREAU

August 3, 2004

WASHINGTON -- More financial institutions than previously disclosed may be at risk of attack, and an al-Qaida operative has told British intelligence that the group's target date is early September, intelligence sources said yesterday.

The operative, described as "credible" by British intelligence, told his debriefers that the attack would take place "60 days before the presidential election" on Nov. 2, according to a former senior National Security Council official. On Sept. 2 President George W. Bush is expected to address the Republican National Convention at Madison Square Garden.

Counterterrorism officials are analyzing data from a computer seized in Pakistan last month to see if financial institutions in addition to the five disclosed Sunday are at risk of attack, U.S. officials said yesterday.

The former senior National Security Council official said he was told by British intelligence that they are interrogating an al-Qaida operative who confirmed that financial institutions are being targeted and that an attack was planned for September.

And a U.S. official familiar with the ongoing analysis of the computer said, "There are references to other things [buildings]" in the al-Qaida computer's data, including a picture of the Bank of America building in San Francisco. "There is mention of other places."

The laptop computer was seized on July 25 following the arrest after a 12-hour gun battle of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, who is wanted for his alleged role in the 1998 bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa.

Pakistan's information minister confirmed to The Associated Press yesterday that e-mail data retrieved from Ghailani's computer indicated planned attacks in both the United States and Britain. A British official said that the threat to the U.K. was not specific.

The CIA had tipped off Pakistani authorities on the location of Ghailani's safehouse in Gujrat, Pakistan, after tracking down an al-Qaida computer engineer, who had e-mailed the data to Ghailani, 12 days earlier, U.S. officials said.

The computer engineer, Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, ran a secret al-Qaida communications system and his arrest was described by a senior U.S. official as the "most significant" of a series of events that led to Sunday's raising of the threat level to "high" for five financial institutions. They are the New York Stock Exchange and Citigroup building in New York, as well as the Prudential financial building in Newark and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund buildings in the nation's capital.

The former NSC official, who asked to not be further identified, said that the al-Qaida operative in British custody, while confirming that financial institutions were at risk, did not know which financial institutions were being targeted. A CIA spokesman declined to comment.

The U.S. official who disclosed yesterday that CIA and other counterterrorism officials are studying the vast amounts of computer data stored in the laptop said that the information on other institutions "does not reach the level of detail" retrieved on the five named Sunday.

Nevertheless, he said, analysts "are continuing to exploit the data to see if anything boils to the surface."

Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.



Ron Wright, Moderator
HSPIG Forums Sit
www.hspig.org

Well, we know after Iraq how low a threshold the Bush administration has for declaring an “immenent threat”.

Posted by: bravej at August 3, 2004 02:02 PM
*************************************************************
ROTFLMAO

BUSH said we needed to act BEFORE Iraq became an immanent threat

JOHN EDWARDS said it WAS and Immanent threat!

That's going to complicate your voting? ;-))

Oh and John Kerry said Iraq was an Unacceptablle Threat.

Hillary Clinton in a speech before the Senate, clamed the same legal justification for going back into Iraq that Bill used for Desert Fox

"What immediate actions are justified?"

Don, if there is/was a cell waiting to carry out this attack, there is a strong possibility that when their contact in Pakistan was captured they would initiate the attack immediatly. Once their operation was compromised their best chance to act was instantly. That is why it was prudent to protect those specific targets the minute the intel became available.
If those buildings would have come down with Bush sitting on that info, you would be the first one in line to hand Bush his head (and rightly so in such a case).

Mark,

Don appears to be an al-Queda supporter from his writings. You can easily see that such writings always support ANYTHING that will harm America. It is a consistent pattern in everything he writes....anti-military, anti-American, anti-Jew, anti-Christian, anti-Life. He seems to hate the world by using such idiotic, smarmy and unintelligent drivel. Ignore him. Your time is too valuable to waste on "nothing beings." He is almost another Screaming Dean.

Terrorists don't do "imminent threat." It's not a bug, it's a feature. It's part of their charm.

:jackson

Mark, Thanks for saying what needed to be said. Any project that's compromised has 3 outcomes, 2 of them negative for the attacker. They can call the whole thing off (like Cole Porter), they can bide their time and attack later, knowing full well the element of surprise is gone, or they can move immediately before the authorities can move defenses into place.

Our Resident Troll reminds me: NEVER EXPLAIN, your friends don't need one and your enemies won't believe it.

In short, nothing we ever do will be enough, or justified, or correct. He's the rubber stamp of negativity.

JZ: Terrorists clearly do chain pulling. We supply the chain.

T8: Other than whine that someone else doesn't agree with your take on current events, do you have anything substantive to add?

Clearly we are prepared to undertake all manner of highly mediagenic public actions over a supposed Threat, about which we really know essentially nothing important.

We had five buildings. Oh no -- it's seven. Wait -- it's up to nine. They are on the Least Coast. No -- there's one or two in the Midwest. Wait -- one has shown up in San Francisco.

The list of potential targets is huge. The list of actual things they can hit is far smaller. Yet they can cause us to increase our National Jitters, interfere with our own commerce, and increase the overall inconvenience factor to folks all across the country just by dropping a little hint here and there that Just Maybe they're Possibly Thinking that Perhaps Someday they might actually Do Something.

Does that work for you?

It doesn't for me.

There's much to be said by acting to deal with an Imminent Threat.

Just at the moment, we have No Idea whether or not such a threat actually exists.

And that's a Fact.

"Just at the moment, we have No Idea whether or not such a threat actually exists. And that’s a Fact."

"WE", being you and I, the public informed through press releases, not intelligence. "WE", the public don't make these decisions. It's not a matter of public consensus whether "WE" protect a likely target. " WE" leave that to the people that know more and cannot tell us, lest they tip-off the perps.

Quitchabitchin. I sense you don't think there is a "situation" here. You, Mr. Uniformed John Q. Public, will never know until it's too late. I suggest that we all find a way to contribute, and not just to the discussion.

Uniformed = Un-INFORMED

MaxD,

Much thanks for making that point. I attempted to point out The Painfully Obvious ™(to all except The Don™!) yesterday...but I guess since this is a different thread, he thought he'd try to spin it here. You know, wash-spin-repeat until it comes out looking like you want it. Perhaps his NIC should be Maytag™.

Now how does that go again...

Posted by: Don at July 21, 2004 12:03 PM
And the gullible tend to grasp at every straw that happens to float by, and proclaim it as Universal Truth Everlasting
It so seldom is.

Hmmm....

And that’s a Fact.
Posted by: Don at August 4, 2004 12:02 AM

Yep, apparently even the cynical and pretentious gullible.

The biggest worry I have is what's called "threat fatigue."

This used to happen with tornado warnings when I was a kid. It seemed like every time the sky clouded up, we'd get a tornado warning. Pretty soon, everyone just blew them off. Which is why it was such a total shock when we did have a tornado. Now days, the weather tech's better, the warning time is longer, and they tend to be accurate when they give a warning. Perhaps what we're seeing is the Homeland security version of 60's and 70's weather forecasting?

I'm kind of with you, Mona, just in a slightly different way.

If our response becomes predictable to these kinds of terror warnings, then it becomes easy for terrorists to probe one area, drawing attention away from another potential area left exposed by the response to the first "threat".

This is why terrorism needs to be cut down at the source. Its amazing to me that so many on this site don't understand that.

Don sed:

JZ: Terrorists clearly do chain pulling. We supply the chain.

No kidding. That would be you, Don, and those like you. You're the pull-chain.

Just at the moment, we have No Idea whether or not such a threat actually exists.


And that’s a Fact.

No kidding. When are you and yours going to think through the implicatiions of this fact, and quit responding as our enemy wants us to respond, with indecision, political sniping and paranoia?

"The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemy's not coming, but on our own readiness to receive him; not on the chance of his not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable."

Sun-Tzu, The Art of War


:jackson

The lefties on this board are saying that the Bush administration is crying "wolf" for its own benefit.

I assume they think the warnings are unnecessary. Will they agree to not make political hay of an "intelligence failure" if such warnings are not made and an attack occurs? Not bloody likely.

Might the administration also be risking a negative to repeated alarms? What can an administration do, they are either overwarning or underwarning. Every time they warn or inconvenience someone gets upset. In fact if they quietly deter an attack they get only the negative effect (no grounds for alarm) without being able to say with any assuredness that their preventive measures did anything (even if they did since we can't see squadrons of aircraft or turbans returning to homebase)..

Granted, Dean is overstating the case that the terror warning was entirely political. However, given it's timing and somewhat dated content, the DHS could have done more to qualify the statement. This, I submitt, is not being carful:

_"'We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,' Secretary Tom Ridge said on Tuesday in dismissing any suggestion that his latest threat warning had a political motive. But on Sunday, Mr. Ridge, a former Republican congressman and governor of Pennsylvania, did do some politics all the same, when he declared that the intelligence behind his alert was 'the result of the president's leadership in the war against terror.'" _

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/politics/administration/whbriefing/

"We don’t do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,’ Secretary Tom Ridge said on Tuesday in dismissing any suggestion that his latest threat warning had a political motive. But on Sunday, Mr. Ridge, a former Republican congressman and governor of Pennsylvania, did do some politics all the same, when he declared that the intelligence behind his alert was ‘the result of the president’s leadership in the war against terror."

Yup. And would we have Homeland Security without his 'Political Leadership' as well?

It's either political or it ain't. If it's all political, I guess we owe something to the fact we are being alerted at all.

Or that ME men (and women) (Google up some stats on who's crossing the border from Mexico by ethnicity and language) in the last two months are being stopped at all.

But then, I suppose that's politics as usual...

The italicized portion Posted by: Todd at August 4, 2004 04:30 PM

It's amazing how many good things are happening in the War on Terror that don't even make it to the MediaRadarScreen.

Ok, I'm confused.
Is it imminent, immenent, or immanent?

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