There it was, on page twelve of my daily newspaper: "I have not seen an indication of an imminent operation," said a White House official speaking on condition of anonymity. He or she was talking about the time, two weeks ago, when Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge warned of imminent al-Qaida attacks against New York City, Washington and Newark, N.J.
Immediately after the warning, police sealed off streets near the Citigroup Center building and the New York Stock Exchange in New York; put employees at the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington through extra security checks; and added barricades and a heavily armed presence around Prudential Financial Inc.'s headquarters in Newark while in Washington, Capitol Police blocked all traffic near the building and began searching vehicles, even though no new threats to the Capitol had been found. Subway riders in Washington shared their commutes with police bearing machine guns. New Yorkers were warned by the FBI warnings threats posed by helicopters and limousines.
And now the Bush administration quietly admits that they have no evidence of imminent plans by terrorists to attack U.S. buildings. Some old documents and computer files were seized in al-Qaida raids and they did include surveillance reports of the financial buildings during 2000 and 2001, but nothing in the documents themselves has suggested any attack was planned soon, the official said.
And so the spin starts. White House homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, told "Fox News Sunday" last weekend that authorities believe discovery of the surveillance has disrupted al-Qaida's plans to carry out the attacks on the financial buildings.
In other words, "thank goodness that we warned you about the non-existent threat because the warning disrupted our enemies' plans to carry out an attack that they had not planned."
Star Tribune (Minneapolis): Official: No Evidence Attack Is Imminent
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