President Bush’s speech yesterday to the National Endowment for Democracy was billed as a major foreign policy pronouncement on the state of the “War on Terror.” But it didn’t seem to contain much new. The war was framed as it has been for the past four years as a battle between the forces of good and the forces of evil. The only slight change was that evil was a bit more fleshed-out this time, referred to as “evil Islamic radicalism,” “militant Jihadism,” and “Islamo-fascism.”
There was, however, one piece of breaking news: Bush’s announcement that “the United States and our partners have disrupted at least ten serious al Qaeda terrorist plots since September the 11th, including three al Qaeda plots to attack inside the United States.” Also, “we’ve stopped at least five more al Qaeda attempts to case targets in the United States, or infiltrate operatives into our country.”
The Bush administration has never given any details about specific successes in this front of the War on Terror. This was the first time any foiled plans had been mentioned, and it was a pretty dramatic statement on the surface.
So what should the diligent reporter do with this startling yet vague declaration? He should follow up, of course.
But the White House apparently didn’t expect anyone in the press would want more details. The Washington Post reported that “at first White House spokesmen were unable to document [the disrupted plots]. After scrambling all day and debating how much could be disclosed in response to media inquiries, the White House produced a list last night.” USA Today described that list as “sketchy” and noted that it was wasn’t even released until 6:20 p.m. Eastern time, when the networks’ evening news shows were winding to a close.
The New York Times and the Washington Post both simply reported on what the White House had given them. Of the three domestic plots, one was old news: the “dirty bomb” that Jose Padilla had been researching. The other two were plans to use hijacked airplanes in attacks on the West Coast in 2002 and the East Coast in 2003. The West Coast attack was apparently the thwarted “second wave” that planned to take down the tallest building in Los Angeles, now called the US Bank Tower. U.S. officials learned about this plot when they captured Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, also the supposed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, in Pakistan in 2003.
The Post reports that many of the remaining plots also “seem tied to Mohammed.” The paper summarizes the remaining claims as follows: “The seven foreign plots said to be disrupted by the United States and its partners included plans to strike London’s Heathrow Airport using hijacked planes, to hit ships in the Persian Gulf region and the Straits of Hormuz, to attack Westerners in Karachi, Pakistan, and to set off multi-target explosions in Britain.
“The five ‘casings and infiltrations’ in the United States involve better-known cases, such as the capture of Iyman Faris, who was accused of exploring the destruction of the Brooklyn Bridge and ultimately pleaded guilty to providing material support to al Qaeda. Another involved a man sent to scout gas stations in the United States, an apparent reference to Majid Khan, who was reportedly assigned by Mohammed to explore simultaneous bombings of gas stations.”
But only the Los Angeles Times went the full distance here, finding a way to include some important context for this list. In the process, it shed some serious doubt on the significance of these supposed terror-deterring achievements.
“Several senior law enforcement officials” quoted throughout the Times story “questioned whether many of the incidents on the list constituted an imminent threat to public safety and said that authorities had not disrupted any operational terrorist plot within the United States since the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.”
On Padilla, the Times’ anonymous senior federal law enforcement officials say there isn’t “any evidence of co-conspirators inside the U.S. or other indication that the plot had developed into any kind of operational plan.” And as far as the other two planned domestic attacks, these same officials say that, at least the second wave attacks, “apparently never rose to the level of a coordinated plan. The Sept. 11 commission report said that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed … became ‘too busy’ to complete the planning for subsequent strikes and that the plots did not progress beyond theoretical stages.”
A federal counter-terrorism official added, “I don’t think we ever resolved these.” These were all plots that were “on the boards, but they never got anywhere,” he said. Another federal counter-terrorism expert stated, “Everyone is allowed to count in their own way.”
The Times’ sources were also skeptical about the five “casings and infiltrations.”
Warren Vieth and Josh Meyer, who put the article together, did an impressive job of gathering inside sources, and quickly. True, they (and their editors) had a three-hour time zone advantage over journalists on the East Coast, but rather than just transcribing the president’s claims without scrutiny, they actually did what journalists are supposed to do: providing a critical context that checked Bush’s words and verified which of them were the real deal and which of them were simply rhetorical flourish.
–Gal Beckerman
Gal Beckerman is a former staff writer at CJR and a writer and editor for the New York Times Book Review.