Fresh threat of summer attack triggers new anti-terror initiative

By Richard B. Schmitt and Josh Meyer
Los Angeles Times

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WASHINGTON — The Justice Department and the FBI said yesterday that they were launching an initiative to root out a possible terrorist attack in the United States this summer, citing vague but "credible" intelligence that al-Qaida was close to making good on its vow to strike U.S. soil again.

U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller said they were starting interviews with citizens throughout the country aimed at developing further intelligence about the possible attacks, setting up a special summer task force to coordinate the effort.

They also appealed to the public for help in locating six previously identified individuals with terrorist leanings and revealed they had started looking for a seventh: a California native, Adam Yahiye Gadahn, who also goes by the name Adam Pearlman.

The FBI described Gadahn, 25, as an associate of a former top al-Qaida lieutenant, Abu Zubaydah, who was once linked to a plot by a group of Algerian terrorists to bomb Los Angeles International Airport in December 1999. Zubaydah is in U.S. custody.

Mueller and Ashcroft declined to speculate on the location of any of the individuals but said they should be considered armed and dangerous.

Gadahn, the new face on the list, was described by Mueller as having attended the al-Qaida training camps in Afghanistan. Gadahn also served as a translator for the terrorist network, Mueller said. Laura Bosley, an FBI spokeswoman in Los Angeles, said Gadahn was last believed to be in the United States in the late 1990s.

At the news conference, Ashcroft and Mueller said the interviews would be patterned after an FBI-led interview program that began before the war in Iraq. Those interviews focused on Muslim neighborhoods and raised concerns that people were being unfairly targeted, although Ashcroft said the exercise produced valuable intelligence.

Details of the new program have not been worked out, and an FBI official said the composition of the Threat Task Force panel had not been decided.

The moves were driven by what the officials said was a troubling flow of new intelligence indicating that al-Qaida was in the final stages of preparing an attack. They also repeated concerns that the national political conventions this summer, among other upcoming high-profile events, pose inviting targets for terrorists.
 
But officials also said they had no information indicating the timing, location or methods of any attacks.

The Department of Homeland Security said it had no plans to raise the national threat level, which has been at yellow, or "elevated," the midpoint of a five-level scale, since January, because there was no information pointing to an imminent attack.

Some Democratic members of Congress and union supporters of presumed Democratic presidential nominee, Sen. John Kerry, said the timing of the threat report might have been intended to distract attention from the situation in Iraq.

But White House press secretary Scott McClellan denied politics was involved. "The president believes it's very important to share information appropriately," McClellan said.

Several U.S. officials said recently they have received a steady influx of general but solid intelligence showing al-Qaida remains determined to infiltrate operatives into the U.S. and launch strikes on U.S. soil.

Authorities have intercepted a stream of "linked" intelligence that points to one attack on a massive scale, according to one just-retired senior federal law-enforcement official. "There are some pretty credible threats, one in particular," said the former official, who spoke only on condition he not be identified. He said that much of the intelligence has come in recent months from intercepts of communications from one country and that it is eerily similar to chatter just before Sept. 11, 2001, in which unidentified operatives spoke about some huge and imminent event.

Some of the linked intelligence points to a major attack on the rail system on the Northeast corridor, from New York to Washington, D.C., and perhaps Boston to the north, said the former official. In response, the FBI and other agencies have deployed large numbers of agents to conduct surveillance on Amtrak and other rail lines.

Among the alleged al-Qaida operatives identified by Ashcroft and Mueller yesterday, investigators have voiced particular interest in Adnan Shukrijumah, who reported to al-Qaida chieftain Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and traveled in the United States.

Mohammed, the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, has been in U.S. custody at an undisclosed location overseas.