Fergie's Tech Blog

NYC Terror Plot Said to Justify NSA Taps

Shaun Waterman writes for UPI:

The Chairman of the U.S. Senate intelligence committee said Sunday that reports of a planned cyanide gas attack on the New York subway system showed the need for continued warrantless surveillance of suspected terrorists.

In book excerpts published by Time Magazine this weekend, Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind reported that U.S. intelligence had in 2003 discovered an al-Qaida design for small and easily constructed makeshift device to produce deadly cyanide gas, and separately discovered the group had a plot to use a series of such devices in a coordinated attack on the New York city subway system.

Suskind, who estimates such an attack would have killed as many people as the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings, reported that, by the time it was discovered by U.S. intelligence, the plot -- hatched by jihadists in Saudi Arabia -- had already been called off by al-Qaida number two Ayman al-Zawhiri, for reasons which are still unclear.

posted by Fergie @ 6/19/2006 12:30:00 PM