Bush: US, allies thwarted terrorist plot to attack Los Angeles

President Bush has declassified portions of a story no doubt to reinforce the NSA evesdropping program and the Patriot Act. The system the Bush Administration is using to fight terrorism is working and protecting American lives at home. Small encroachments privacy are necessary in war to protect civilian lives. Particularly in the kind of war Islamofascists are implimenting against America.

President Bush is seeking terrorists wherever they may be found, which is a bettter excuse to invading Iraq than looking for WMD. The President made unpopular unilateral decisions pertaining to Iraq. Much of the world is beginning - slowly, but still beginning - to wake up to the threat of Islamofascism.

Recently Asian allies aided in the prevention of Al Qaeda trying to pull another 911 in California and Washington State. The war is on folks and victory is the only option.
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AFP
Yahoo News
2/9/2006

US President George W. Bush unveiled new details about a thwarted September 11th-style Al-Qaeda plot to crash a hijacked airliner into the tallest building in Los Angeles in 2002.
Bush credited robust cooperation between the United States and its allies in Southeast Asia for dismantling the operation, and said global pressure had left Osama bin Laden's terrorism network "weakened and fractured" and short of cash.

The White House had described the plot -- which targeted the 310-meter (1,017-foot) US Bank Tower, also known as Library Tower -- in October 2005, but Bush disclosed an unprecedented amount of newly declassified information.

Bush said Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -- sometimes called the mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks -- planned to have terrorists hijack an airplane, use shoe bombs to breach the cockpit doors and fly the jet into the building.

Bush said that instead of using Arab hijackers, as in the attacks on New York and Washington, the plot called for "young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion."

The operatives met with bin Laden before beginning their preparations for the attack, which started to unravel in early 2002 when "a Southeast Asian nation" caught a key Al-Qaeda operative, said Bush.

The president did not name the operative or the country.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's key co-conspirator was Hambali, a leader of the Al-Qaeda affiliate Jemaah Islamiyah (JI), said Bush. The plotters were captured in 2003 in Pakistan and Thailand, respectively.

"Subsequent debriefings and other intelligence operations made clear the intended target and how Al-Qaeda hoped to execute it. This critical intelligence helped our allies capture the ringleaders and other known operatives who had been recruited for this plot," said the president.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan denied any linkage between the new details and Bush's aggressive campaign to defend his secret domestic spying program, which some lawmakers have called illegal.

But McClellan said the administration had worked to declassify the new material "probably at least three weeks" -- right as the controversy over the warrantless surveillance mushroomed.
The president said the plot and the way it was thwarted highlighted the nature of the global war on terrorism and especially the importance of robust international cooperation.

"From the vantage point of a terrorist sitting in a cave, the future seems increasingly bleak," Bush said. "Across the world, our coalition is pursuing the enemy with relentless determination. And because of these efforts, the terrorists are weakened and fractured.

"Yet they're still lethal," he said.

The official investigation into the 2001 attacks also alluded to the skyscraper, saying that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had originally hoped to fly jets into "the tallest buildings in California and the state of Washington."

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