Perfect Timing! On the first anniversary of the quadruple suicide/homicide attacks on the London transit system both terrorists and those charged with counterterrorism scored major publicity coups--the FBI, as the Washington Post reported, with the revelation that alert agents foiled an Al Qaeda plot to blow up one of the tunnels underneath the Hudson River and one of the London "martyr" bombers with a pre-taped warning of more terror attacks to come.
Although U.S. officials in the counterterrorism community criticized the New York Daily News for breaking the plot story based on leaked information and for thereby harming further investigations, there was not shortage of officials eager to bask in the youngest counterterrorism success before cameras and microphones. If the scoop in the Daily News did indeed impede on-going investigations in this case, why didn't officials hold back with their triumphant accounts? Instead, one got the feeling that everybody was happy to be part of a counterterrorist success story--just like a few weeks ago, when a group of unsophisticated Floridians were arrested for allegedly plotting terror attacks on the Sears Building in Chicago and FBI offices in Florida. Some officials characterized the Floridians' activities as boiling down to aspirations--not operations. In case of the latest plot, some insiders speak again of disrupting it in an "aspirational and not operational" stage.
For two years or so, the Department of Homeland Security got the attention of the media and the public by heightening the levels of its color-coded terror alert system. With this controversial alarm scheme out of favor, revelations about discovered and interrupted terrorism plots assure breaking news.
As for terrorist propaganda, it was no coincidence that an Al-Qaeda-friendly web site released a video taped testimonial left behind by one of the London suicide-homocide bombers in time for making headlines on the first anniversary of the 7/7 strikes. The most disconcerting part of the tape was the warning that the London bombings were just the beginning of more, and more lethal strikes--unless the United Kingdom were to withdraw its troops from Afghanistan and Iraq. The same video contained a claim by bin Laden's right hand man al-Zawahiri that the London bombers had ties to Al Qaeda. Both messages were analyzed at considerable length by experts and non-experts in the media. The net result was once again lots of publicity for terrorist propaganda.
Also coinciding with London's rememberance of the victims of 7/7 was a grim assessment of the terror threat in the United Kingdom by Metropolitan Police Commissionar Ian Blair. "There are, as we speak, people in the United Kingdom planning further atrocities," he told the BBC. "Since July [2005], the threat has palpably increased."
How in the world would the authorities know that people in their country are plotting lethal terror strikes and that the threat has increased--without, obviously, a clue about who is planning what, when, and where? Ian Blair may well be right--but why stirring the fear and anxiety of an already uneasy public that has no way to prevent further strikes?
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