Bush details foiled 2002 terrorist plot on L.A.

President continues defence of decision to allow agencies to snoop on phone calls
PAUL KORING

WASHINGTON -- Al-Qaeda ordered suicide hijackers to destroy a Los Angeles skyscraper barely a month after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks, but the plot was discovered and thwarted, U.S. President George W. Bush said yesterday.

The disclosure came as Mr. Bush continued his spirited defence of a controversial and secret decision to allow intelligence agencies to snoop on telephone calls in and out of the United States without warrants or court approval.

While Mr. Bush stopped short of saying one of those intercepts uncovered the Los Angeles plot, he said wiretaps are vital to defending the United States from terrorist attacks.
"If someone from al-Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Mr. Bush has said. Yesterday, he offered previously highly classified details of what he called an example of successful intelligence coupled with international co-operation to thwart terrorist attacks.

"While Americans were still recovering from an unprecedented strike on our homeland, al-Qaeda was already busy planning its next attack," Mr. Bush said. "In October, 2001, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the September 11th attacks, had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast," the President said, providing new details of a plot that he first referred to in October.

According to Mr. Bush, South Asians were recruited and trained for the hijacking in Afghanistan. They met with and were approved by al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, then a fugitive after U.S. forces led the ouster of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. The plot, however, failed when at least some of them were apprehended by an unidentified South Asian country.

The timing of the planned attack remains unclear. In December of 2001, Richard Reid, a Briton with al-Qaeda links, attempted to detonate a bomb in his shoe aboard a Paris-to-Miami flight. He was restrained by passengers and crew.

In light of what Mr. Bush said yesterday, that seemingly bizarre and disconnected plot may have been a trial run for the Los Angles attack. An identical shoe bomb was supposed to be carried on board another flight that day by another Briton, Sajid Badat, but he backed out.
But if U.S. intelligence didn't know in advance of the Reid-Badat plot, it had apparently intercepted some sort of communication between Mr. Mohammed and Hambali, an Indonesian Muslim extremist and a key al-Qaeda ally in Southeast Asia who uses only one name. Although Hambali wasn't arrested until August of 2003, he apparently had recruited four hijackers for the Los Angeles hijacking.

"Hambali recruited several key operatives who had been training in Afghanistan," Mr. Bush said in a speech at the National Guard Memorial Building. "Once the operatives were recruited, they met with Osama bin Laden, and then began preparations for the West Coast attack."
Both Mr. Mohammed, who was captured in the spring of 2002, and Hambali are believed to be in U.S. custody in one of the secret prisons somewhere beyond the reach of U.S. courts.
Yesterday's speech offered the most complete account to date of a second strike aimed at both coasts, which Mr. Bush vaguely referred to last year when he said that the United States had foiled at least 10 al-Qaeda plots since Sept. 11, 2001.

But details were still sketchy, among them whether the shoe bombs were designed to be taken off and wedged against cockpit doors before being detonated. It was also unclear whether the aircraft to be hijacked were on trans-Pacific flights -- meaning they would be low on fuel when they reached their targets -- or were supposed to be seized shortly after takeoff, as was the case with the four heavily laden jetliners on Sept. 11, 2001.

In his speech, Mr. Bush mistakenly referred to the Los Angles skyscraper as the Liberty Tower. In fact the 310-metre, 73-storey building still popularly known as the Library Tower has been renamed the US Bank Tower.

The President is in the middle of a sustained effort to rally public support for the covert eavesdropping scheme that Democrats, and some Republicans, have condemned as illegal domestic spying.

Mr. Bush insists the intercepts carried out by the shadowy National Security Agency only listened to telephone calls where one party was overseas.

I don't know, do you think it was worth it?