The detailed surveillance photos and documents that prompted higher terror warnings came largely from a Pakistani computer engineer whose capture set Pakistani and US officials searching for those planning to harm America, and what they intend to do.
In the 72 hours leading up to Sunday's warning about new risks of terror attacks, senior officials pored over a wealth of detailed new information indicating al-Qaeda operatives were collecting chillingly precise information about five financial-services buildings in the US.
The trove of hundreds of photos, sketches and written documents came to light as a result of Pakistan's mid-July capture of Muslim extremist Mohammad Naeem Noor Khan, also known as Abu Talha.
Officials are now following investigative leads, as they try to learn more about possible plots against the apparent targets: The Citigroup Center building and the New York Stock Exchange in New York, the IMF and World Bank buildings in Washington and Prudential Financial Inc's headquarters in Newark, New Jersey.
The information amassed by the plotters "was gathered in 2000 and 2001," and "it appears that some of it may have been updated as recently as January of this year," Frances Townsend, the White House homeland security adviser, said on PBS' NewsHour With Jim Lehrer.
But, she added, "you can't tell from the intelligence itself whether or not those individuals [who amassed it] are still here."
On Monday, a Pakistani intelligence official said Khan, a computer and communications expert, had sent messages to suspected al-Qaeda members using code words -- a practice typical of the international jihadist organization that bedeviled US efforts to unravel the Sept. 11, 2001, plot. But the Pakistani official refused to say if Khan was part of al-Qaeda.
Khan's information has been merged with other pieces of intelligence, including information gleaned after Pakistan's arrest last month of a senior al-Qaeda operative named Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani.
E-mails that included plans for new attacks in Great Britain and the US were found on the computer of the captured Ghailani, Pakistan's information minister, Sheikh Rashid Ahmed, said Monday. But it was Khan and the information found after his arrest that was mostly behind the decision to raise the terror alert for the financial-services buildings in New York, Washington and northern New Jersey.
‘UNUSUAL EVENT’: The Australian defense minister said that the Chinese navy task group was entitled to be where it was, but Australia would be watching it closely The Australian and New Zealand militaries were monitoring three Chinese warships moving unusually far south along Australia’s east coast on an unknown mission, officials said yesterday. The Australian government a week ago said that the warships had traveled through Southeast Asia and the Coral Sea, and were approaching northeast Australia. Australian Minister for Defence Richard Marles yesterday said that the Chinese ships — the Hengyang naval frigate, the Zunyi cruiser and the Weishanhu replenishment vessel — were “off the east coast of Australia.” Defense officials did not respond to a request for comment on a Financial Times report that the task group from
Asian perspectives of the US have shifted from a country once perceived as a force of “moral legitimacy” to something akin to “a landlord seeking rent,” Singaporean Minister for Defence Ng Eng Hen (黃永宏) said on the sidelines of an international security meeting. Ng said in a round-table discussion at the Munich Security Conference in Germany that assumptions undertaken in the years after the end of World War II have fundamentally changed. One example is that from the time of former US president John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address more than 60 years ago, the image of the US was of a country
DEFENSE UPHEAVAL: Trump was also to remove the first woman to lead a military service, as well as the judge advocates general for the army, navy and air force US President Donald Trump on Friday fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Air Force General C.Q. Brown, and pushed out five other admirals and generals in an unprecedented shake-up of US military leadership. Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social that he would nominate former lieutenant general Dan “Razin” Caine to succeed Brown, breaking with tradition by pulling someone out of retirement for the first time to become the top military officer. The president would also replace the head of the US Navy, a position held by Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to lead a military service,
BLIND COST CUTTING: A DOGE push to lay off 2,000 energy department workers resulted in hundreds of staff at a nuclear security agency being fired — then ‘unfired’ US President Donald Trump’s administration has halted the firings of hundreds of federal employees who were tasked with working on the nation’s nuclear weapons programs, in an about-face that has left workers confused and experts cautioning that the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE’s) blind cost cutting would put communities at risk. Three US officials who spoke to The Associated Press said up to 350 employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) were abruptly laid off late on Thursday, with some losing access to e-mail before they’d learned they were fired, only to try to enter their offices on Friday morning
RSS