NEW YORK (Reuters) - The warning that U.S. financial centers may be attacked by al Qaeda was based largely on three-year-old information, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge says, but some intelligence dates from January and he insists the threat is still real.
Ridge's appearance in New York at the Citigroup building named on Sunday as a potential al Qaeda target came as U.S. terrorism intelligence has come under fire again, this time for forcing police in New York, Washington and New Jersey to massively increase security based on old information.
"I don't want anyone to disabuse themselves of the seriousness of this information simply because there are some reports that much of it is dated, it might be two or three years old," Ridge said on Tuesday.
Al Qaeda had updated its surveillance of financial buildings "as recently as January this year," he said.
"This is the most significant, detailed pieces of information about any particular region that we have come across in a long, long time, perhaps ever."
In Britain, which has resisted calls to issue a U.S.-style terror alert for fear of causing panic, police arrested 13 men in anti-terror raids but refused to say whether the captures were connected to recent arrests in Pakistan connected to the latest U.S. terror warning.
Ridge denied there was any political motivation behind raising the terror alert when President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, are neck-and-neck in polls ahead of November's presidential election.
"This is not about politics. It's about confidence in government," Ridge said."
BURSTING THE BOUNCE?
But former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean accused Bush of releasing the information now to dampen the rise in opinion polls, or "bounce," Kerry might have expected after his nominating convention in Boston last week.
"Isn't it unusual they might choose two days after the Democratic National Convention when John Kerry was in the middle of his bounce," Dean, who ran against Kerry for the presidential nomination, said in an interview on MSNBC's "Hardball." The alert, he said, could have been issued weeks ago.
New York City Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat with ambitions of being elected mayor, said the city spends about $1 billion a year to fight terrorism and Washington was "still not providing us with the support we need to ensure the safety of American citizens."
The city now has 4,000 fewer police than on September 11, 2001, and this year New York was given $5.47 per head in homeland security grants -- the second lowest in the nation.
Jorge Diaz, a Times Square building safety worker, felt the government was now overcompensating for failing to point out the nation might be attacked three years ago.
"At a certain point it becomes exaggerated," Diaz said.
Amid the heightened terror alert, New York's Statue of Liberty reopened for the first time since the September 11 attacks thanks to over $30 million in private donations. But the crown on America's best-known symbol remains off-limits.
Ridge said there was no information on the potential timing of any attack and no evidence of more recent surveillance by al Qaeda of the buildings named in the latest terror alert.
One U.S. counter-terrorism official told Reuters the Bush administration had earlier intelligence that al Qaeda might attack the U.S. economic sector before November's election. The latest information on specific buildings in the financial sector had no time element, he said, but coupled with the belief of a pre-election attack on such targets, the decision was taken to raise the security alert.
U.S. intelligence gathering came under fire from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks and on Monday Bush endorsed creating a national intelligence director and backed some other reforms recommended by the panel.
Top counter-terrorism officials told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the commission's proposals were too sweeping and lacked enough detail to fix the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy.
But Republican commissioner John Lehman said the proposals should be "enacted as a whole package."
In response to the fresh alert, police toting machine guns have manned key sites in New York and truck traffic in and out of Manhattan via bridges and tunnels has been restricted.
Also named in the alert were the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington and the Prudential Financial building in Newark, New Jersey, across the river from New York.
On Sunday, the United States raised the terror level to orange or "high," the nation's second-highest readiness for attack. For the first time the alert specifically named targets, all of them at the heart of the capitalist system.
Reuters
Ridge's appearance in New York at the Citigroup building named on Sunday as a potential al Qaeda target came as U.S. terrorism intelligence has come under fire again, this time for forcing police in New York, Washington and New Jersey to massively increase security based on old information.
"I don't want anyone to disabuse themselves of the seriousness of this information simply because there are some reports that much of it is dated, it might be two or three years old," Ridge said on Tuesday.
Al Qaeda had updated its surveillance of financial buildings "as recently as January this year," he said.
"This is the most significant, detailed pieces of information about any particular region that we have come across in a long, long time, perhaps ever."
In Britain, which has resisted calls to issue a U.S.-style terror alert for fear of causing panic, police arrested 13 men in anti-terror raids but refused to say whether the captures were connected to recent arrests in Pakistan connected to the latest U.S. terror warning.
Ridge denied there was any political motivation behind raising the terror alert when President George W. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Sen. John Kerry, are neck-and-neck in polls ahead of November's presidential election.
"This is not about politics. It's about confidence in government," Ridge said."
BURSTING THE BOUNCE?
But former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean accused Bush of releasing the information now to dampen the rise in opinion polls, or "bounce," Kerry might have expected after his nominating convention in Boston last week.
"Isn't it unusual they might choose two days after the Democratic National Convention when John Kerry was in the middle of his bounce," Dean, who ran against Kerry for the presidential nomination, said in an interview on MSNBC's "Hardball." The alert, he said, could have been issued weeks ago.
New York City Speaker Gifford Miller, a Democrat with ambitions of being elected mayor, said the city spends about $1 billion a year to fight terrorism and Washington was "still not providing us with the support we need to ensure the safety of American citizens."
The city now has 4,000 fewer police than on September 11, 2001, and this year New York was given $5.47 per head in homeland security grants -- the second lowest in the nation.
Jorge Diaz, a Times Square building safety worker, felt the government was now overcompensating for failing to point out the nation might be attacked three years ago.
"At a certain point it becomes exaggerated," Diaz said.
Amid the heightened terror alert, New York's Statue of Liberty reopened for the first time since the September 11 attacks thanks to over $30 million in private donations. But the crown on America's best-known symbol remains off-limits.
Ridge said there was no information on the potential timing of any attack and no evidence of more recent surveillance by al Qaeda of the buildings named in the latest terror alert.
One U.S. counter-terrorism official told Reuters the Bush administration had earlier intelligence that al Qaeda might attack the U.S. economic sector before November's election. The latest information on specific buildings in the financial sector had no time element, he said, but coupled with the belief of a pre-election attack on such targets, the decision was taken to raise the security alert.
U.S. intelligence gathering came under fire from the commission investigating the September 11, 2001, attacks and on Monday Bush endorsed creating a national intelligence director and backed some other reforms recommended by the panel.
Top counter-terrorism officials told lawmakers on Capitol Hill that the commission's proposals were too sweeping and lacked enough detail to fix the U.S. intelligence bureaucracy.
But Republican commissioner John Lehman said the proposals should be "enacted as a whole package."
In response to the fresh alert, police toting machine guns have manned key sites in New York and truck traffic in and out of Manhattan via bridges and tunnels has been restricted.
Also named in the alert were the New York Stock Exchange, the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington and the Prudential Financial building in Newark, New Jersey, across the river from New York.
On Sunday, the United States raised the terror level to orange or "high," the nation's second-highest readiness for attack. For the first time the alert specifically named targets, all of them at the heart of the capitalist system.
Reuters
