im sure if president bush, the FBI, and the homeland security goons discovered a plan to crash jets into buildings in downtown los angeles it would have made the front page news of every newspaper in the country. after all that would be a great way to convice the public that the government needs more money for homeland security, and a good case to lobby for the police state patriot act. and thats why i suspect these two stories about a planned terrorist attack on los angeles are bogus. sure maybe they busted the guy for jay walking but now they are trying to make him out as a terrorist who planned to fly a plane into downtown los angelse Original Article Bush tells of terror plot on LA tower President stresses need for vigilance Peter Baker and Dan Eggen Washington Post Feb. 10, 2006 12:00 AM WASHINGTON - President Bush, under pressure from Congress, defended his campaign against terrorism Thursday, offering for the first time a vivid account of a foiled al-Qaida plot to strike the United States after Sept. 11, 2001, by crashing a hijacked commercial airliner into a Los Angeles skyscraper. Bush said four Southeast Asians who met with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in October 2001 were taught how to use shoe bombs to blow open a cockpit door and steer a plane into the Library Tower, since renamed the U.S. Bank Tower, which at 72 stories is the tallest building on the West Coast. Asian authorities captured the four before they could execute the plan, he said. Declaring that "America remains at risk," Bush cited the episode as an example of international cooperation against terrorism and argued against complacency. "We cannot let the fact that America hasn't been attacked in 4 1/2 years since September 11, 2001, lull us into the illusion that the threats to our nation have disappeared. They have not," he said. The reported West Coast plot has been disclosed before but never in as much detail. The president's speech came on the same day as a Senate hearing into the Bush-ordered warrantless surveillance of telephone calls and e-mail by Americans and their contacts overseas, but aides said his comments were not related to the dispute over the program. White House officials, who were unwilling to publicly describe details of the plot as recently as last fall, said they decided in the past three weeks to declassify it so Bush could have an example to provide publicly. But several U.S. intelligence officials downplayed the relative importance of the plot and attributed the timing of Bush's speech to politics. The officials, who declined to be identified because they did not want to criticize the White House publicly, said there is deep disagreement within the intelligence community over the seriousness of the Library Tower scheme and whether it was ever much more than talk. One intelligence official said nothing had changed to precipitate the release of more information on the case. The official attributed the move to the administration's desire to justify its efforts in the face of criticism of the surveillance program, which had no connection to the incident. Sen. Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia, ranking Democrat on the intelligence committee, mocked the idea of raising the Library Tower plot. "Maybe they're tired of talking about (the) Brooklyn Bridge and they're trying to find a different edifice of some sort," he said, referring to another terrorist plot that some have said was inflated by the government. But Frances Fragos Townsend, the president's chief counterterrorism adviser, told reporters in a conference call that "there is no question in my mind that this is a disruption." "It's not about credit," Townsend said, "it's about protecting the American people. And the American people are absolutely safer as a result of these arrests." Bush first alluded to the incident in a speech last October when he said the United States and its allies had thwarted 10 serious al-Qaida attacks since Sept. 11. A White House list released at the time referred to a plot to fly a hijacked plane into an unspecified West Coast city in 2002. Citing unidentified sources, news organizations reported that the target was the Library Tower and that the plot's author was Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in 2003. Mohammed's original plan for Sept. 11, as presented to bin Laden in 1998 or 1999, called for hijacking 10 jetliners on both coasts, according to interrogations of Mohammed cited by the commission that investigated the attacks. U.S. officials concluded that bin Laden instructed Mohammed to initially focus on the East Coast because it was too difficult to recruit enough operatives to seize 10 planes. After the Twin Towers were knocked down, Mohammed set about putting his West Coast plan into motion. In the White House's latest account, Mohammed deputized Hambali, head of the affiliated Southeast Asian group, Jemaah Islamiya, to set up a West Coast attack, and they put together a four-man cell. Asians were chosen, Bush said, on the theory that they would draw less suspicion. The four Asians traveled to Afghanistan to meet with bin Laden in October 2001 just as U.S. forces were hunting al-Qaida, officials said. After swearing loyalty to the al-Qaida leader, the four returned to Asia to train in the use of shoe bombs like those later found on Richard Reid, who was convicted of trying to take down an airliner over the Atlantic in December 2001. But the cell leader was captured by authorities in a Southeast Asian country in February 2002, and the three others were later detained, as well. "As the West Coast plot shows," Bush said, "in the war on terror we face a relentless and determined enemy that operates in many nations, so protecting our citizens requires unprecedented cooperation from many nations." Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he was blindsided by Bush's announcement of new details about the plot to crash a plane into the skyscraper. But the White House and state officials said the Mayor's Office had been contacted beforehand. "I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the Democratic mayor said. "I don't expect a call from the president, but somebody." White House spokesman Scott McClellan said Los Angeles officials were told Wednesday about the Bush's planned remarks. Michelle Petrovich, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, said the agency notified Los Angeles police, along with state officials, that the plot would be mentioned during the president's remarks. A spokesman for the state Office of Homeland Security said the agency's chief contacted a deputy mayor Wednesday about the speech. Villaraigosa later confirmed that City Hall was called Wednesday by state officials. But that information was general, city officials said. Associated Press contributed to this article. http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/0210TerrorPlots10-ON.html Malaysian pulled out of L.A. terror plot, officials say Associated Press Feb. 10, 2006 07:10 AM KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - A Malaysian recruited by al-Qaida to pilot a plane in a second wave of Sept. 11-style attacks on the United States pulled out after observing the carnage of the first assaults, Southeast Asian officials said Friday. President Bush on Thursday disclosed an alleged plot to hijack an airliner and fly it into a skyscraper in Los Angeles. He said cooperation between Washington and several Asian countries helped expose it. The plan never appeared close to the stage where it could be put into execution. Scores of arrests in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks severely curtailed al-Qaida and its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah. Adding details to Bush's outline, security officials and terrorism experts in Southeast Asia on Friday said Malaysian engineer Zaini Zakaria was among three men al-Qaida was preparing to take part in an attack on the U.S. West coast. Zaini, 38, traveled to al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan in 1999, where he met senior figures in the terrorist group, including Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin, or Hambali, a Malaysian security official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. When he returned to Malaysia the same year, Zaini enrolled in a flight school and obtained a license to fly a small plane. He then began making inquiries in Australia about getting a license to fly a jet, the official said. But Zaini was never told what his mission for al-Qaida would be. When he saw media coverage of the Sept. 11 attacks, he severed his ties with the militants. Zaini, who has been detained without trial in Malaysia since he surrendered in December 2002, told Malaysian interrogators that he "didn't want that kind of Jihad," an official familiar with the interrogation told the AP. A senior police officer involved in the interrogation, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said Zaini told his Malaysian interrogators "he was not prepared to die as a martyr, so he backed out." The possible "second wave" attack was mentioned briefly in the June 2004 U.S. National Commission report on the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. It quoted Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the reputed mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, as saying "three potential pilots were recruited for the alleged second wave." It identified them as Zacarias Moussaoui, Abderraouf Jdey, and Zaini. However, Mohammed told his U.S. interrogators that "he was too busy with the 9/11 plot to plan the second wave of attacks," the report said. Zaini, a native of the northeastern state of Kelantan, was doing some odd jobs before he surrendered to Malaysian authorities in Kelantan in December 2002, apparently because he was worried about an ill relative, said his former lawyer Saiful Izham Ramli. Saiful said Zaini never told his lawyers about taking flight classes, and his arrest records do not describe him as a pilot or being a suspect in a "second wave" attacks. He said Zaini was principally wanted by authorities for his links with Jemaah Islamiyah, a common charge for which scores of suspects are being held in a high-security prison in Kamunting under a law that allows indefinite detention without trial. In 2003 the United States ordered frozen Zaini's financial assets, and that of several other suspects. His family is now so poor that they cannot even afford to travel to Kamunting in central Malaysia to visit him, Saiful said. Zaini's wife hails from the southern Johor state's Ulu Tiram district, the site of a school where Hambali and other Indonesian terror leaders allegedly were based for some years. Bush's disclosure has strained relations between the White House and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who said he got word of the new details like everyone else - by watching Bush's speech on TV Thursday. The mayor accused the Bush administration of taking too long to tell him of the new information. Bush said terrorists intended to use shoe bombs to hijack an airliner and crash it into downtown's 73-story US Bank Tower. Villaraigosa said his office should have been warned beforehand about Bush's announcement, which set off a new round of anxiety over terrorism in the nation's second-largest city. "I'm amazed that the president would make this (announcement) on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor said in an interview with The Associated Press. "I don't expect a call from the president - but somebody." Villaraigosa also criticized the White House for rebuffing requests in July and August to meet with the president to discuss security issues. As it turns out, the White House did notify City Hall, if indirectly. A spokesman for Matt Bettenhausen, California's homeland security chief, said he personally contacted a deputy mayor Wednesday afternoon with advance notice of the president's comments.