New York – Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police chief insisted Friday they did the right thing by going public with a terrorist threat to bomb the New York subway, brushing aside suggestions from Washington that they overreacted to information of dubious credibility.
“If I’m going to make a mistake, you can rest assured it is on the side of being cautious,” Bloomberg said, flanked by the chief.
The dispute came as thousands of extra police officers poured into the city’s subway system, pulling commuters out of rush-hour crowds and rifling through their bags or briefcases in a crackdown that was announced late Thursday afternoon and continued Friday.
A law-enforcement official in New York, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the tightening of security was prompted by an informant’s report of a plot to attack the subway system with bombs hidden in bags and possibly baby strollers.
In Iraq, meanwhile, authorities seized a third suspect in the alleged plot Friday and investigated whether a fourth man had traveled to New York as part of the scheme, according to the law-enforcement official.
The official said the man’s trip to New York was described by an informant who had spent time in Afghanistan and proved reliable in past investigations. But the official added that authorities had not confirmed whether the fourth man even exists.
The city’s announcement of the alleged plot – and the warning to New Yorkers to keep their eyes open for anything suspicious – led to jostling between city officials and homeland-security officials in Washington, who downplayed the threat.
Homeland Security Department spokesman Brian Doyle said Friday: “The specified intelligence was checked out through the intelligence agencies. They looked at all the information and couldn’t put a credible factor on it.”
But Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly vigorously defended their decision to go public.
“We did exactly the right thing,” Kelly said.
Kelly, Bloomberg and other city officials declined to release details of the alleged plot, saying much of the information was classified. But Bloomberg called the report the most specific terrorist threat that New York officials had received to date and said it was essential to err on the side of caution when protecting the city of 8 million.
Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., said it was wrong for federal homeland-security officials to try to discount the security concerns of New York officials.
“That sends a mixed message which confuses the people, and besides that, they’re wrong,” he said. “Even if there was some doubt as to what the right thing to do is, you shouldn’t be having public disputes over that.”
President Bush, asked if he thought New York officials had overreacted, said: “I think they took the information we gave and made the judgments they thought were necessary.”
U.S. forces in Iraq arrested two suspected plotters who had been under close surveillance until Thursday morning, the law-enforcement official in New York said.
