Playing Terrorism, flaws, doubts, pretexts...

[Chiwas]

New Qaeda Activity Is Said to Be Major Factor in Alert
By DOUGLAS JEHL and RICHARD W. STEVENSON

Published: August 4, 2004

ASHINGTON, Aug. 3 - Senior government officials said Tuesday that new intelligence pointing to a current threat of a terrorist attack on financial targets in New York and possibly in Washington - not just information about surveillance on specific buildings over the years - was a major factor in the decision over the weekend to raise the terrorism alert level.

The officials said the separate stream of intelligence, which they had not previously disclosed, reached the White House only late last week and was part of a flow that the officials said had prompted them to act urgently in the last few days.

The officials disclosed the information a day after the Bush administration acknowledged for the first time that much of the surveillance activity cited last weekend by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge to justify the latest, specific warnings had been at least three years old. At the same time, the White House offered a vigorous defense of its decision to heighten the alert in Manhattan, Newark and Washington, with officials saying there was still good reason for alarm.

"I think it's wrong and plain irresponsible to suggest that it was based on old information,'' Scott McClellan, the White House spokesman, said of the heightened warning as President Bush traveled to Dallas on a campaign swing.

In an appearance in New York, Mr. Ridge responded forcefully to a question about whether election-year politics had played a part in determining how and when the intelligence was released.

"We don't do politics in the Department of Homeland Security,'' Mr. Ridge said.

He added: "The detail, the sophistication, the thoroughness of this information, if you had access to it, you'd say we did the right thing. Government should let the public know about situations like this. It's not about politics. It's about confidence in government telling you when they get the information.''

In addition to the surveillance activity, detailed in reports uncovered late last week from computer disks in Pakistan, a senior intelligence official said that "very current and recent activity on the part of Al Qaeda'' has left little doubt that "Al Qaeda is moving toward the execution stage of attacks here in the homeland.''

The language used by senior administration officials on Tuesday in warning of a possible attack was at least as strong as that Mr. Ridge used in announcing the alert on Sunday, and much stronger than the language used on Monday, when the officials acknowledged that the reconnaissance reports dated back to the period surrounding the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Among other things, one official disclosed on Tuesday that one intelligence report had pointed to a possible attack "in August or September.''

That shifting tone may prove frustrating to the public, providing little guidance for assessing the gravity of threat information whose details remain shrouded in intelligence reports not available to anyone outside the highest ranks of the government.

A senior White House official who mentioned the new stream of intelligence in an interview refused to say anything more about its source or content. The official said it had not been publicly disclosed out of concern that such a step could compromise intelligence and law enforcement operations in the United States and around the world. Officials would not describe those operations but said they were meant to disrupt a possible plot.

But senior federal intelligence and law enforcement officials also described the intelligence as important. They said it had reached the White House last Friday and strongly reinforced the sense of alarm prompted by the separate flow of information that was arriving at the same time via the Central Intelligence Agency from Pakistan and that was based on information culled from seized computer disks that contained detailed case reports of reconnaissance conducted on buildings in Manhattan, Newark and Washington in 2000 and 2001.

In providing new details about those case reports, senior government officials described them for the first time as discrete documents, each at least 20 pages long and devoted to a particular target, and perhaps most intriguingly, they said, written in "perfect English.''

The author of the reports was "obviously someone who has lived an extensive period of time in the West, exceptionally professional, exceptionally meticulous,'' a senior intelligence official said in a telephone interview. "Anyone who thinks that these terrorists are a bunch of ne'er-do-wells, if 9/11 didn't convince them, these case reports would convince them.''

Though the case reports do appear to have been completed before the Sept. 11 attacks, as Bush administration officials first acknowledged on Monday, some of the computer files appear to have been updated or accessed more recently. One was a file modified in January and including a photograph of a building, a senior White House official said. The official also said there was reason to believe that people associated with Al Qaeda who are still at large would have had access to the reports.

The officials would not identify the building that appears in the recently modified file, except to say that it was not one of the five that have been named. Those five are the New York Stock Exchange and the Citigroup Center in Manhattan, the Prudential building in Newark and the headquarters of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Washington.

The officials also acknowledged that they had not been able to assess the significance of the fact that the computer file had been modified. Such a modification could have meant that the file was updated with newly taken surveillance photographs but might simply have meant that the file had recently been opened and closed.

The White House officials spoke in a lengthy interview arranged at the request of The New York Times in which they offered a detailed accounting of the decision-making that led to the terrorist alert.

The computer disks on which the case reports were found were linked to Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a 25-year-old Pakistani computer engineer who was arrested by Pakistani authorities on July 13, American officials have confirmed. The officials have described Mr. Khan's arrest, carried out at the request of the C.I.A. , as having provided the crucial breakthrough in the case, leading them not only to the case reports but also to information about other Qaeda officials still at large who appear to have had access to the documents.

Mr. Khan has been described as having cooperated with Pakistani and American interrogators, and some American officials said that the information he himself provided, as distinct from the computer records, may also have pointed to the prospect of a current threat of terrorism in New York and Washington.

A senior official from the Department of Homeland Security was among those who sought to emphasize that the computer files containing the case reports were not the only new source of intelligence being reviewed at senior levels of the administration in the hours before the alert was made public.

"All the information wasn't from one source; there was new information that was introduced late Friday night,'' the official said.

For weeks, senior intelligence officials have said that multiple streams of intelligence, including information provided from intercepted communications, interrogations of Qaeda prisoners and foreign intelligence services, had pointed to the increasing possibility of a major terrorist attack in the United States this year, most likely before the Nov. 2 election.

But the government officials said the intelligence reviewed only late last week was more significant in pointing to financial targets in New York and possibly Washington.


Eric Lichtblau contributed reporting for this article.