Bush details al Qaeda plot to hit LA
(Reuters)
Updated: 2006-02-10 09:31

US President Bush disclosed new details on Thursday of a thwarted al Qaeda plot to use shoe bombs to hijack a plane and fly it into a Los Angeles building, as he sought to justify his tactics in fighting terrorism.

US President George W. Bush delivers a speech on the War on Terror in Washington February 9, 2006. Bush gave details of a foiled terrorist plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building in Los Angeles. [Reuters]

With critics questioning the legality of his authorization of a domestic spying program, Bush used newly declassified details of a previously revealed plot to show that the threat of terrorism has not abated.

"America remains at risk, so we must remain vigilant," Bush said.

He said that in early 2002 the United States and its allies disrupted a plot to use bombs hidden in shoes to breach the cockpit door of an airplane and fly it into the tallest building in Los Angeles.

But he got the name of the building wrong, saying the "intended target was Liberty Tower." He meant Library Tower, now the US Bank Tower, that at 1,017 feet high is the tallest building in the United States west of the Mississippi River.

The Bush administration last October had cited the plan to attack West Coast targets using hijacked planes as among 10 disrupted al Qaeda plots.

Bush gave a more detailed account on Thursday, saying that in October 2001, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the operational mastermind of the September 11 attacks that year, set in motion a plot for another attack inside the United States.

"Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September 11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sought out young men from Southeast Asia whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion," he said.

Mohammed worked with a man known as Hambali, the leader of an al Qaeda-affiliated group in Southeast Asia, who recruited a cell of four operatives, the White House said. Mohammed trained the cell leader in the shoe bomb technique and they met al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in October 2001, said Frances Townsend, homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Bush.

The West Coast plot initially was to have been part of the September 11 attack, but bin Laden decided to focus on the East Coast because it was too difficult to get operatives for both, she said.

She said authorities did not know specific details of the planned attack such as its timing or the flight.

"We knew they were going to fly a commercial airliner into the tallest building in California," Townsend said. "And it was an analytic judgment by the intelligence community that that meant the Library Tower."

The plot was disrupted with help from two countries in Southeast Asia and two countries in South Asia, Townsend said.

Bush has been fighting criticism from Democrats and some Republicans over his decision to authorize the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without court warrants inside the United States on international e-mails and phone calls of people with suspected ties to terrorism.

He has called it a necessary tool for fighting terrorism and preventing another attack on the United States.

Townsend would not comment on whether the eavesdropping program helped in foiling the West Coast plot or capturing the plotters.

The cell leader was arrested in February 2002 and the other three operatives were also caught, but Townsend declined to identify the three or the countries where they were captured.

Mohammed was captured in Pakistan in March 2003, and Hambali was caught in Thailand in August 2003.

Bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, believed by U.S. officials to be hiding in the border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, have so far eluded the U.S. manhunt.

Townsend said it was unclear whether the West Coast plot had any connection to "shoebomber" Richard Reid.

Reid failed in an attempt to blow up an American Airlines plane from Paris to Miami in December 2001 after passengers and crew tackled him as he tried to ignite explosives in his shoe. Reid was sentenced to life imprisonment by a U.S. court in January 2003.

"I've never seen anything that indicated whether the second wave was bonafide or not. There's been rumors bandied about that it was, but I don't know," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said of the hijacked plane plot.