Washington – President Bush on Thursday tried to re focus American attention on terrorism, declaring in a speech that the United States and its partners had disrupted 10 serious plots since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The White House said these included a failed effort in 2002 to use hijacked airplanes to attack “targets on the West Coast” and a similar East Coast plot in 2003.
The 2002 plot appeared be the most significant disclosure, and counterterrorism officials said Thursday evening that it had been led by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have been the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks and who was not captured until 2003, in Pakistan.
A listing, produced hastily several hours after Bush’s wide- ranging speech, also included some previously known cases, such as the one that led to the arrest in May 2002 of Jose Padilla, who intelligence officials say was exploring the possibility of setting off a dirty bomb in an American city. It was not immediately clear whether other items on the list represented significant threats.
Bush used his speech, before the National Endowment for Democracy, to warn that Syria and Iran had become “allies of convenience” for Islamic terror groups, appearing to step up political pressure on both countries. He said that “the United States makes no distinction between those who commit acts of terror and those who support and harbor them,” and he warned that “the civilized world must hold those regimes to account.”
A senior White House official said Thursday evening that the president’s 40-minute speech about al-Qaeda and Iraq arose from Bush’s desire to remind Americans after “a lot of distractions” in recent months that the country is still under threat and had no choice but to remain in Iraq so that al-Qaeda does not use it as a base to train for attacks on the U.S. and its allies.
Bush’s speech came on a day of a terror alert involving a possible bombing threat in the New York subways and also as senior government officials described a warning from one senior al-Qaeda leader to another that attacks on civilians and videotaped executions committed by his followers could jeopardize their broader cause. The warning from Ayman al-Zawahiri to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the top militant leader in Iraq, was spelled out in a 6,000-word letter, dated early in July, that was obtained by U.S. forces conducting counter-terrorism operations in Iraq, the official said.
Bush’s warnings about the need for renewed American attention to what he called “this global struggle,” and the release of information on past plots that the White House had previously been reluctant to discuss on security grounds, came at a moment of heightened criticism of Bush’s handling of the war in Iraq and the broader effort against terrorism.
It also comes as he is trying to heal fractures in his own party about his selection of a nominee for the Supreme Court, and as he has faced complaints about the government’s response to Hurricane Katrina. A poll released by CBS News on Thursday evening indicated that Bush’s approval rating had dropped to 37 percent and that disapproval of his handling of terrorism was at an all-time high.
Democrats were quick to answer Bush, saying that he was gliding past major errors of tactics and strategy in Iraq and that al-Qaeda only began operating there after the U.S. invasion.
Harry Reid, the Democratic leader, said: “The truth is, the administration’s mishandling of the war in Iraq has made us less safe, and Iraq risks becoming what it was not before the war: a training ground for terrorists.”
Reid said it was vital that the administration change course in Iraq.
In an unusual move, Bush named Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, five times in his speech and quoted bin Laden’s own statements to support Bush’s argument that terror groups inspired by al-Qaeda were trying to “enslave whole nations and intimidate the world,” starting in Iraq.
“They achieved their goal, for a time, in Afghanistan,” Bush said of the country that was bin Laden’s sanctuary until the U.S.- led invasion in fall 2001. “Now they’ve set their sights on Iraq. Bin Laden has stated: ‘The whole world is watching this war and the two adversaries. It’s either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.”‘
Bush went on to compare Islamic militant leaders – at one point he used the phrase “Islamo-fascism” – with Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, and he said that their ideology, “like the ideology of communism, contains inherent contradictions that doom it to failure.”