Bush tells of a foiled plot to strike LA

WASHINGTON -- Providing new details about a foiled plot, President Bush said yesterday that the United States and the governments of several Southeast Asian countries disrupted a plan by Al Qaeda to hijack a commercial airliner and fly it into a Los Angeles skyscraper in early 2002.

Speaking to the National Guard Association, Bush said Al Qaeda operatives recruited a new suicide hijacking cell shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, introduced them to Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan, then sent them to Southeast Asia for training, where they learned to use shoe bombs to penetrate locked cockpits. The plot fell apart after the cell's leader was arrested in February 2002, Bush said.

The administration first disclosed the alleged plot to target Los Angeles's Library Tower, the West Coast's tallest building, in October, saying it was among a list of foiled terror plots, but the details had been classified. Meanwhile, the political debate has intensified over Bush's antiterror techniques, including a top-secret domestic-spying program he authorized, the renewal of the USA Patriot Act, and the use of harsh interrogation techniques against terrorism suspects.

With the speech yesterday, the president clearly intended to raise the stakes for critics of his policies. ''As the West Coast plot shows, in the war on terror, we face a relentless and determined enemy," Bush said.

Democrats and some security specialists, however, questioned the timing of the president's disclosures, calling it part of the White House strategy of building public support to blunt congressional scrutiny about antiterror policies.

''It is hard not to be cynical about this," said P.J. Crowley, a former National Security Council official in the Clinton administration.

White House press secretary Scott McClellan said the administration ''is always looking to keep the American people informed about the threats we face and provide them better context and better understanding of what we are doing to confront those threats, and so that's what this is about."

Still, the speech was made near the end of a tough week for the White House.

On Monday, Republicans and Democrats grilled Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the legality of Bush's order allowing a military intelligence agency to listen in on Americans' international phone calls without a warrant. On Wednesday and yesterday, the administration reversed course under congressional pressure and allowed Gonzales and Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence, to brief the House and Senate intelligence committees about the domestic-spying program.

Meanwhile, Congress has so far resisted Bush's call to extend the surveillance law known as the USA Patriot Act, because some senators want stronger civil liberties protections. In addition, lawmakers from both parties have expressed skepticism over the president's assertion that his wartime powers give him the authority to waive a ban on harsh interrogations if national security is at stake.

To build public support for his policies, Bush has delivered a series of campaign-style speeches about terrorism.

According to yesterday's speech and a subsequent White House briefing, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the mastermind of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, had wanted to simultaneously attack tall buildings on the West Coast and targets in New York City and Washington. But Al Qaeda leaders decided the plan was too ambitious and postponed the western phase.

In October 2001, they allegedly reactivated that phase and chose Los Angeles as the target, the administration said. Feeling that Arabs would attract too much suspicion, they reached out to Hambali, the leader of Jemaah Islamiyah, an Islamist terrorist group in Indonesia.

Hambali and Mohammed allegedly picked four Southeast Asian men who had already received some training in Afghanistan. The cell met with bin Laden in Afghanistan and swore an oath of allegiance sometime in October 2001, then returned to an undisclosed country in Southeast Asia to continue preparations, the government said.

Authorities say the plot was disrupted in February 2002 when the leader of the cell, whom Mohammed himself had trained how to smuggle shoe bombs, was arrested. Neither Bush nor his aides would identify the leader or the country of his arrest. Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan a month later, Hambali was arrested in Thailand in August 2003, and the other three members of the cell are also in custody, the administration said.

Frances Fragos Townsend, the president's homeland security adviser, said the Los Angeles plot proves ''the importance of real-time information-sharing" paired with international cooperation and detainee interrogations. ''It also reminds us that we must continue to gather as much information as possible, and from all sources, especially detainee debriefings and intelligence operations, to reveal the evolving terrorist networks and plots," she said.

Townsend would not say whether the military intelligence domestic-spying program, launched weeks after Sept. 11, helped disrupt the plan. The secret program ''has resulted in successes, but I can't relate it in any way one way or another to this particular plot," she said.

Crowley, President Clinton's former NSC official, said Townsend ''implicitly welcomes the connection between stopping this plot and having the terrorist surveillance program. But it is not evident the two are connected."