Newsweek Sniffed Out London Attack

“In November,” reports Salon‘s War Room, [Michael] Isikoff and Mark Hosenball wrote a piece for Newsweek in which they said that U.S. law enforcement officials were extremely concerned about ‘evidence regarding possible active Al Qaeda plots to attack targets in Britain’.”

How worried were law enforcement types? This worried: “According to a U.S. government official,” Isikoff and Hosenball wrote, “fears of terror attacks have prompted FBI agents based in the U.S. Embassy in London to avoid traveling on London’s popular underground railway (or tube) system, which is used daily by millions of commuters. While embassy-based officers of the U.S. Secret Service, Immigration and Customs bureaus and the CIA still are believed to use the underground to go about their business, FBI agents have been known to turn up late to cross-town meetings because they insist on using taxis in London’s traffic-choked business center.”

So, what did the FBI know last winter? And cheers to more prescient reporting from Newsweek which, four weeks before the Iraq invasion — as Ray McGovern famously reminded us recently — stated that Saddam’s runaway son-in-law Hussein Kamel assured questioners that WMDs had long ago been destroyed in Iraq. (“Former CIA Analyst Blasts WaPo Editorial Staff,” BooMan Tribune).

P.S. The title and subtitle of Isikoff’s Nov. 2004 piece: “The Real Target? New intelligence suggests that Al Qaeda was planning to attack London, not U.S. financial centers, in the run-up to the presidential election. A Kerry adviser blames politics for the timing of the government’s summer alert.”