Al Qaeda attack on LA foiled, claims Bush

George W. Bush

WASHINGTON - US President George W. Bush claimed yesterday that that the US and its allies had foiled an al Qaeda bid to follow up the September 11 2001 attacks by hijacking a commercial jet with the use of shoe bombs and flying it into the tallest building in Los Angeles.

According to the President, Khaled Sheikh Mohammed - captured in Pakistan in March 2003 and one of the masterminds of 9/11 - was plotting the new operation as early as October 2001, just a month after the devastating attacks on New York and Washington.

This time it would be carried out not by Arabs but by young South East Asian men, recruited by al Qaeda from the militant Islamic group Jemaah Islamiyah, active in Indonesia, the Philippines and other countries in the region.

The plot called for hijackers armed with shoe bombs, to break into the plane's cockpit and seize control.

Their target, Mr Bush said, was the former Library Tower - since renamed the US Bank Tower - a 1,017 ft tall, 73-storey skyscraper dominating LA's downtown.

The recruits had already met Osama Bin Laden and started detailed preparation for the attack.

But the scheme was apparently disrupted when an unspecified South East Asian country captured an important al Qaeda operative in early 2002.

It finally unravelled the following year, Mr Bush claimed, when an Indonesian known as Hambali, the presumed head of Jemaah Islamiyah, was arrested in Thailand.

The account, offered in a speech to National Guard units here, was not the President's first public reference to the failed plot.

But it is by far the most detailed, and clearly designed to convince Americans that real headway was being made in the war on terror.

It was also an implicit defence of the National Security Agency's controversial domestic eavesdropping programme, conducted without warrants but - the White House insists - essential in tracking down terrorists and their associates in the US.

Last October Mr Bush briefly mentioned the failed West Coast attack when he claimed that since 9/11 Washington and its allies had foiled 10 important al Qaeda plots, including three aimed at targets inside the US.

One was the Los Angeles operation.

The second was an attack on the East Coast, apparently planned for 2003 but of which no details have ever been provided, while the third involved Jose Padilla, arrested in May 2002 at a Chicago airport, and said to be planning a radioactive 'dirty bomb' attack against a US city.

The use of shoe bombs was pioneered by the British citizen Richard Reid, who tried to blow up an American Airlines plane from Paris to Miami in December 2001 before passengers tackled him as he was about to ignite explosives hidden in a running shoe.

In January 2003, Reid was sentenced by a US court to life imprisonment.

But the paucity of detail meant that the other claims were met with scepticism - doubts that only increased in November 2005 when the US authorities, after holding Mr Padilla incommunicado in a navy prison for more than three years, abruptly abandoned the sensational 'dirty bomb' accusations.

He now faces relatively minor terrorism charges, for which he will go on trial in Miami this autumn.

With yesterday's speech, the White House was also seeking to focus the country's attention on the terrorism issue, and on the administration's success in preventing further attacks on US oil since 9/11 itself.

With Republicans facing tricky mid-term elections this November, in which the party could lose control of the House or Senate (and conceivably both), poll after poll shows that the party's strongest card is its perceived ability to 'keep America safe.' This support has allowed Mr Bush to mount a vigorous defence against charges that the NSA wiretaps are illegal.

Despite the political uproar - and complaints by some Republican, as well as Democratic, lawmakers - a majority of ordinary Americans believe that the administration is entitled to do whatever it deems necessary to protect the country.

Meanwhile the Pentagon is being accused of using brutal and inhumane methods to break a hunger strike at the Guantanamo Bay prison, including 'restraint chairs' in which inmates are strapped for hours at a time.

A military spokesman said that the number of hunger-strikers had dropped from 84 in December to just four now.

But detainees' lawyers said the treatment employed was "a disgrace."

- INDEPENDENT