Posted on 02/02/2004 10:12:59 PM PST by kattracks
The Associated Press 2/2/04 7:13 PMWASHINGTON (AP) -- Terror threats that led to cancellation of one domestic and six trans-Atlantic flights have passed, and the government has no plans to ground more planes, officials said Monday.
No arrests were made nor weapons seized in relation to the cancellations, and law enforcement officials acknowledged they are unsure whether the steps taken disrupted attacks.
But Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and other Bush administration officials said the cancellations were warranted because of the "specific information on when and what flights" the al-Qaida organization had planned to target.
"We didn't quite have the specificity with regard to the nature of the attacks," Ridge said.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said there are no plans to ground any more flights.
"At this point we do not have any new threat reporting, targeting specific flights, like we did over the weekend," he said.
Six international flights from the United Kingdom and France and Continental Airlines Flight 1519 from Washington to Houston, site of the Super Bowl, were grounded Sunday and Monday after security problems were raised by the Homeland Security Department.
The cancellations were the first since December, when the nation's terror alert level was increased from elevated, or yellow, to high, or orange. The level was ratcheted back 19 days later.
A senior law enforcement official, speaking Monday on condition of anonymity, said some themes continue to emerge from intelligence collection: al-Qaida is determined to mount another large-scale attack and remains highly interested in aviation and weapons of mass destruction. It's possible, the official said, that the two attack methods could be combined, but no specific plot has been reported.
The Continental flight was the first domestic flight to have been canceled. Federal officials declined to provide details about the nature of the threat.
The flight was scheduled to have taken off from Dulles International Airport outside Washington at 5:45 p.m. EST Sunday and arrived at Bush Intercontinental Airport 3 hours 25 minutes later, at 8:10 p.m. CST.
The Houston airport is 27 miles from the site of the Super Bowl, which was then under way. However, a U.S. government official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the flight cancellation was not specifically connected to the Super Bowl.
Severin Borenstein, an airline economics professor at the University of California, said the cancellation of a domestic flight is more unnerving for U.S. airline passengers than grounding an overseas flight.
"A concern about a direct breach of security in the U.S. is a more serious issue and more likely to make people nervous," Borenstein said. "There's no question this is really squeezing the airline industry."
The international flights canceled included a Continental Airlines flight Sunday from Glasgow, Scotland, to Los Angeles, with a stop in Newark, N.J.; British Airways Flight 223 from London to Dulles for Sunday and Monday and Flight 207 from London to Miami on Sunday; and Air France Flight 026 from Paris to Washington on Sunday and Monday.
A British pilots' union official expressed concern Monday over what it called the erratic nature of the security intelligence leading to flight cancellations.
"It is the sort of thing that feeds public disquiet rather than resolves the concern of passengers, pilots and the U.K. industry as a whole," said Jim McAuslan, general secretary of the British Airline Pilots Association, which represents nearly 90 percent of Britain's 9,200 commercial pilots.
British Airways spokesman Jeffrey Angel said the airline has not suffered from the cancellations due to terrorist concerns of some flights in December. He said the airline's trans-Atlantic bookings were up 168 percent in January.
"Passengers see very clearly how seriously we take security," Angel said. "If we have the slightest concern over any flight, we won't operate."
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