Washington – President Bush, under pressure from Congress, defended his campaign against terrorism Thursday, offering for the first time a vivid account of a foiled al-Qaeda plot to strike the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, by crashing a hijacked commercial airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper.
Bush said four Southeast Asians who met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in October 2001 were taught how to use shoe bombs to blow open a cockpit door and steer a plane into the Library Tower, the tallest building on the West Coast. Asian authorities captured the four before they could execute the plan, he said.
Declaring that “America remains at risk,” Bush cited the episode as an example of international cooperation against terrorism and argued against complacency. “We cannot let the fact that America hasn’t been attacked in four and a half years since September 11, 2001, lull us into the illusion that the threats to our nation have disappeared. They have not,” he said.
The reported West Coast plot has been disclosed before but never in as much detail. The president’s speech came on the same day as a Senate hearing into the Bush-ordered warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail by Americans and their contacts overseas, but aides said his comments were not related to the dispute over the program.
White House officials, who were unwilling to publicly describe details of the alleged plot as recently as last fall, said they decided in the past three weeks to declassify it so Bush could have an example to provide publicly.
But several U.S. intelligence officials downplayed the relative importance of the alleged plot and attributed the timing of Bush’s speech to politics. The officials, who declined to be identified because they did not want to criticize the White House publicly, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk.
One intelligence official said nothing had changed to precipitate the release of more information on the case.
The official attributed the move to the administration’s desire to justify its efforts in the face of criticism of the surveillance program, which had no connection to the incident.
