"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."Only by reading into the article does one notice that there may actually be more to these alerts than these two "newspapers of record" actually make out.
We know that al-Qaeda is planning, and desperately wants, to strike the US again before the November election. In part they need to do this to show their supporters in the Arab world that they are still a credible force. We have also found out that the latest al-Qaeda reconnaissance on these buildings was gathered in January of this year. It would seem fairly obvious that given all this information a higher level of alert is necessary, especially at the sites looked at by al-Qaeda as potential targets. Most likely, nothing will happen at these sites, perhaps because of the attention that they have received. Once a plan like this is exposed it makes the terrorists look for other targets.
There is also the possibility that the intelligence on these planned attacks was gathered not from the sources that were recently arrested. Debka yesterday wrote that these latest two suspects captured probably could not have had such knowledge of planned attacks. It is very possible that the information was gathered from other sources that the US does not want to reveal; perhaps other terrorists captured whose identities have not yet been revealed in order to be able to continue getting good information from them. This is just a supposition on my part, but maybe it is something that the major newspapers should take into account before coming out with stories that aim to impugn the motives, albeit indirectly, of the Bush Administration.
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