George W. Bush spoke this morning at the National Guard Memorial Building in Washington where he touched upon issues related to the ongoing war on terror, including progress made to prevent post-9/11 attacks on this country. His most notable remark was about a specific threat against the US Bank Tower in Los Angeles.
Bush has referred to the 2002 plot before. In an address last October, he said the United States and its allies had foiled at least 10 serious plots by the al-Qaida terror network in the last four years, including plans for Sept. 11-like attacks on both U.S. coasts. The White House initially would not give details of the plots but later released a fact sheet with a brief, and vague, description of each.
The president filled in details on Thursday.
He said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had already begun planning the West Coast operation in October, just after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. One of Mohammed’s key planners was Hambali, the alleged operations chief of the al-Qaida related terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah. Instead of recruiting Arab hijackers, Hambali found Southeast Asian men who would be less likely to arouse suspicion and who were sent to meet with Osama bin Laden, Bush said.
Under the plot, the hijackers were to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial jetliner, take control of the plane and crash it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, Bush said.
Obviously this is great news, but I question why the administration waited for nearly 4 years before telling Americans about this success story. If this and other evidence of thwarted attacks had been reported earlier on, we might not be having the debate over the NSA Terrorist Surveillance program today.
I generally agree with the idea of information being disseminated on a ‘need to know’ basis, and often times, Americans just don’t need to know about this government detail or that. Yet in this case, the war on terror, wouldn’t it behoove the administration and ultimately serve the American public to hear about our successes more often?