WASHINGTON — With pressure mounting on the White House to more fully explain its anti-terrorism strategy, President Bush offered new details Thursday of a reported plot against downtown Los Angeles as evidence of success in foiling attacks.
Federal officials had revealed two years ago that they believed Al Qaeda operatives, in a West Coast follow-up to the Sept. 11 attacks, had planned to hijack an airliner and crash it into what was then called the Library Tower.
But Bush, offering new specifics in a speech designed to boost support for his national security policies, said Thursday that the terrorist operatives planned to use "shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door." He said Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed had recruited and trained young Asian men to carry out the plot because suspicions of Arabs were running high, but that the plan was derailed when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key Al Qaeda operative.
Bush did not name the nation or the operative, but his decision to reveal even the most incremental details of the reported plot underscored the effort the White House has undertaken recently to defend its anti-terrorism policies.
The details did little to counter skepticism from Democrats and some law enforcement officials who have questioned whether the reported scheme had ever been put into operation before it was thwarted.
"It didn't go," said one U.S. official familiar with the operational aspects of the war on terrorism. "It didn't happen."
The official said he believed the Library Tower plot was one of many Al Qaeda operations that had not gone much past the conceptual stage. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity, saying that those familiar with the plot feared political retaliation for providing a different characterization of the plan than that of the president.
Bush's chief domestic security advisor, Frances Townsend, said the plotters had described their target only as the tallest building on the West Coast, and that it was the "analytic judgment" of the U.S. intelligence community that they intended to strike the Library Tower.
Bush misspoke when making a similar point: "We believe the intended target was Liberty Tower in Los Angeles," he said. The building was renamed in 2003 and is now known as the U.S. Bank Tower.
Bush first mentioned the Los Angeles plot in a speech in October, when he listed 10 post-Sept. 11 schemes that had been disrupted. At the time, he gave few details.
