Posted on 06/18/2006 1:48:34 PM PDT by MikefromOhio
NEW YORK — U.S. officials received intelligence that Al Qaeda operatives had been 45 days away from releasing a deadly gas into the city's subways when the plan was called off by Usama bin Laden's deputy in 2003, according to a book excerpt released Sunday on Time magazine's Web site.
According to the investigative report by Ron Suskind, an informant close to Al Qaeda leaders told U.S. officials that Ayman al-Zawahiri had canceled the plan in January 2003, despite the likelihood that the strike would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 attacks.
The informant said the operatives had planned to use a small, easily concealed device to release hydrogen cyanide into multiple subway cars. U.S. officials had already discovered plans for the device on the hard drive of a computer of a Bahraini jihadist arrested in February 2003, and they had been able to construct a working model from the plans.
The easy-to-make device, called "the mubtakkar," meaning "invention" in Arabic or "initiative" in Farsi, represented a breakthrough in weapons technology that "was the equivalent of splitting the atom," Suskind writes in his book. All previous attempts to use the deadly gas, similar to that used in Holocaust-era gas chambers, in mass attacks had failed.
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
Don't know....maybe :)
No terror threat at all, but do send more money!
The London train bombing was July 7th.
yeah....
and there's something to that date as well...
of course
Only there's no Ortho for them except losing elections.
Heading out.
It was a "Kerry-level" homeland security alert-- top was "Deuced Annoying" and lowest was "Don't alarm the servants," as I recall.
I couldn't find the "Democrat" one I wanted, which had "spin, lie, and petition the UN" on it.
LOL
C ya
I expect the next attack will focus on a "red-state" area. Blue areas like cities are craven and liberal enough that they are already somewhat on AQ's side.
That's great imagery, but I think you're kidding yourself if you think Bush would do something like that. Heck, he'd sooner see our own troops prosecuted for every single alleged act of 'misbehavior' or unavoidable collateral damage than displease the world and the media.
We live in the age of political correctness, and even our military tactics are dictated by this insane philosophy. Bush would no more order the nuking of Pakistan or Afghanistan after a big terror attack on U.S. soil than he would order 20 million illegal aliens to be deported back to where they came from when it's well known they are causing a huge cultural divide in our country, and a great many of them are dangerous criminals. The man is a PC liberal, a globalist, a multi-culturalist and a self-admitted appeaser whose politics are based on "being a uniter, and bringing both parties together". Bush hasn't shown me anything but mediocrity and an egregiously poor ability to LEAD. I think our best hope of ever nuking a terrorist islamofacist country would be to learn how to clone a human being, then dig up Harry Truman and have him push the button. No beurocrat, wussy politician in Washington today would ever find the guts to do it.
I kinda doubt it.
Terrorists feel the need to get big points in their attacks, which means they will attack large population centers.
My guess is that they will be more apt to target liberal bastions because they might consider them soft targets....
Imagine this, we have a keyboard warrior calling the President a wuss....
what is with Sundays on this forum? It brings all the nuts out.
Liberals weren't the only ones making fun of the terror alert level. Unfortunately, many here did, and do also.
well I wasn't here yet, so I wouldn't have known. :)
Of course, maybe someone got "wind" of it around here, and passed it along, causing a very well placed phone call. Even the Ka'aba can turn to green glass, after all.
I remember a bunch of them raising hell about bag searches before getting on the subway. I even recall some of them talking about ways to disrupt the search process, too.
Except even the terrorists know that if they cream a Blue city, the Reds will blame it on Bush. If they cream a Red city, the citizens might come out with arms and fight the hell back.
Yeah, but respond where? One strength of the terrorist strategy is plausible deniability. No country is convincingly responsible, and they are dispersed enough that a nuclear response isn't discriminating... it takes out everything, possibly raising sentiment for their "cause."
I find it hard to believe that nuking anything short of the Kaaba would have any effect, and I doubt we would have done that.
We were already in Afghanistan.....
Given how sometimes terrorists can't keep their mouths shut, MAYBE we'd get tipped to something.
Certainly it wouldn't be an immediate response. But I would be willing to bet that it would happen.
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