Why Didn't 99 Other Senators Close Up Shop Too?
Minnesota Senator Mark Dayton shuts down his office after a
CIA briefing
By ELAINE SHANNON
Monday, Oct. 18, 2004
When Senator Mark Dayton shut down his Washington office last week, ostensibly out of concern for his staff's safety, many on Capitol Hill wondered if the Minnesota Democrat knew something everyone else didn't. The answer, it turns out, is far from it. Dayton last month received the same briefing as his fellow Senators about a CIA worst-case scenario involving simultaneous terrorist attacks across the country. Yet he apparently took the hypothetical threat as an imminent one. "Most people who heard the briefing," sniffs an intelligence official, "understood the context. It was theoretical."
Even stranger, Dayton sent his staff home several days after the CIA toned down the dramatic multiple-attack scenario, which the intelligence community "no longer believed to be valid," says the official. The CIA's initial report conflicted sharply with assessments by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that al-Qaeda is no longer able to mount synchronized spectacular events. In fact, fears of a pre-election attack have eased as an all-out push by law-enforcement and intelligence officers has failed to detect any trace of a terrorist cell operating in the U.S. "It's about as quiet as it can possibly be," says a top counterterrorism official. But he and others remain watchful. It was eerily calm before 9/11 too. Dayton's press secretary says the Senator has had "no second thoughts" about the closing.
From the Oct. 25, 2004 issue of TIME magazine
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101041025-725093,00.html
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Analysis from ERRI spokesman Clark Staten.
He runs an excellent website.
http://www.emergency.com/ennday.htm
Time Magazine: Dayton Reportedly Evacuated DC Office Over "Hypothetical Threat"
WASHINGTON, DC: According to a report in the Oct. 25, 2004 issue of TIME magazine, Senator Mark Dayton shut down his Washington office last week as the result of a CIA worst-case scenario briefing involving simultaneous terrorist attacks across the country. apparently Senator Dayton took the "hypothetical threat" as opposed to an "imminent one."
The CIA then toned down the dramatic multiple-attack scenario, which the intelligence community "no longer believed to be valid," an intelligence official told Time. The CIA's initial report conflicted sharply with assessments by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security that al-Qaeda is no longer able to mount synchronized spectacular events. In fact, fears of a pre-election attack have eased as an all-out push by law-enforcement and intelligence officers has failed to detect any trace of a terrorist cell operating in the U.S.
The problem with that assessment, ERRI counter-terrorism analysts say and the Time magazine article points out, is that it also got "extremely quiet" just prior to the 11 September, 2001 attack in Washington and New York City. "There are many historical pattern similarities between the Summer of 2001 and the Fall of 2004," ERRI spokesman Clark Staten noted.
"Furthermore and with all due respect to the experts in DC...anyone who does not believe that Al-Qaeda operatives could carry out a series of car bombing in the United States tomorrow must be simply kidding themselves," Staten added. "Our assessment would suggest that Al-Qaeda is waiting and planning for one or more spectacular terror events...they do not want to carry out simplistic car/truck bombs that kill a few dozen people in each occurrence...that doesn't prove anything," the veteran analyst continued.
"What they really want is a major attack(s) that again prove their prowess and spread wide-spread fear among American citizens...they want to 'top themselves' and undertake an attack(s) that surpasses the events of 9/11," Staten said. "If this attack (or series of attacks), manages to take a hundreds or thousands of lives they will have achieved their objective. If concurrently these events influence or change the election process in the United States -- so much the better, in the view of the bad guys," Staten concluded.