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No Known Threat Against U.S. Transit, Officials Say
There is no known specific threat against U.S. mass transit systems, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said yesterday in the wake of the twin attacks this month on London’s subway trains and buses (see GSN, July 8). “Obviously we’re concerned about it,” Gonzales said on CNN’s Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer. “We know we have an enemy that’s very patient and very diabolical.” Al-Qaeda appears to be behind the July 7 attacks in London that killed 52, the apparently failed strike two weeks later in London and the bombings Saturday that killed scores in an Egyptian resort area, Gonzales said. There has been “credible but not specific” intelligence on possible attacks on transit systems, a senior U.S. intelligence official said earlier this month, according to USA Today. Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said a major fear is the use of biological weapons by a terror cell made up of U.S. citizens. “The greatest fear that people combating terrorism have is that people committing terrorism could be citizens of your own country,” he said. Terrorists are not believed to possess the capability to develop nuclear weapons, Ridge said. Some analysts believe al-Qaeda is seeking that capability, while others believe it is just an “idle wish” for terrorists, a senior official affiliated with the National Intelligence Council told USA Today. “Al-Qaeda’s WMD is a wish-list so far. They don’t have a significant enough sanctuary to receive, develop, construct and deploy a WMD yet, and I say ‘yet’ advisedly,” a U.S. intelligence official said by e-mail (John Diamond, USA Today, July 25).
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