Terrorist Chatter
“This is the most serious threat that I’ve seen in the last several years,” Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the chamber’s Intelligence Committee, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program. “There’s been an awful lot of chatter out there” among terrorists, Chambliss said, noting it’s “reminiscent of what we saw pre-9/11.”
Twenty-two embassies and other diplomatic posts were closed yesterday, including in Libya, Egypt, Yemen and Jordan. Some of them were removed from the list of closures for the week, while others were added.
“Current information suggests that al-Qaeda and affiliated organizations continue to plan terrorist attacks both in the region and beyond, and that they may focus efforts to conduct attacks in the period between now and the end of August,” the department said last week. The attacks “may involve public transportation systems and other tourist infrastructure.”
The warning of a potential attack by al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations is unusual this time partly because the groups are so “widely dispersed,” said Michael Chertoff, who was Homeland Security secretary under PresidentGeorge W. Bush.
“It’s actually quite rare to have this broad and yet so alarming and specific a warning be publicly disseminated,” Chertoff, who founded a security consulting company in Washington, told ABC’s “This Week.”
Benghazi Attack
The State Department pledged to increase security at embassies and consulates after the attack on a U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, led to the death of U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans. The Central Intelligence Agency said it had warned the State Department repeatedly of terrorist threats in Benghazi before the attack, according to e-mails released later by the White House.
The State Department had issued a similar warning of possible attacks before that.
The latest alert and embassy closures may be an effort to disrupt al-Qaeda operations, according to Michael Hayden, who served as CIA director under the George W. Bush administration.
The announcements may be designed to put al-Qaeda “on the back foot, to let them know that we’re alert and we’re on to at least a portion of this plot line,” Hayden said yesterday on “Fox News Sunday.”
Too Ambitious
The scale of the attacks discussed in the intercepted al-Qaeda communications, coupled with the fact that the messages violated the terrorist group’s known rules about avoiding mobile and satellite phones and online conversations in favor of couriers, made some intelligence officials suspicious about the group’s intent, the two U.S. officials said.
The attacks the terrorists discussed were too ambitious in size and scope to ignore, both officials said, and that may have been deliberate. It’s also possible the discussions were intended to put al-Qaeda back in the headlines after years of foiled plots. The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because they aren’t authorized to speak publicly.
At the same time, said both officials, it’s not time to exhale because the list of targets and the timing in the intercepted communications may have been deliberately misleading, or the planners may have gone back to the drawing board after they learned that their plans had been discovered.
The U.S. warning came days after al-Qaeda’s leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, urged his followers in a speech posted on jihadist websites to attack U.S. sites as a response to American drone strikes in Pakistan and Yemen, according to the SITE Intelligence Group, which monitors terrorist groups.
