DEBKAfile Clarifies Its Disclosure of Al Qaeda's Radiological Threat to New York

DEBKAfile CLARIFIES ITS DISCLOSURE OF AL QAEDA’S RADIOLOGICAL THREAT TO NEW YORK

August 13, 2007, 9:19 PM (GMT+02:00)

At midnight Thursday, Aug. 9, DEBKAfile’s monitors of terrorist Web sites and forums connected the messages accumulating from midday. They spelled out an al Qaeda threat mentioning New York, Los Angeles and Miami as targets of attacks “by means of trucks loaded with radioactive material.” Our counter-terror sources and monitors stressed “there is no way of gauging for sure how serious these threats are, or how real.”

Monday, Aug. 13, the chatter continues.

Such disclosures are the daily content of DEBKAfile – not only about al Qaeda, but terrorist organizations in the Middle East and other parts of the world. We believe that holding back such information would be irresponsible and wrong and possibly expose people in targeted countries, most predominantly the United States and Israel, to danger. After this data is aired on our free site, our job is done and it is up to the relevant security authorities to decide how to deal with it.

In this case, the New York Police Department very properly responded.

After 24 hours, during which time the department almost certainly put its vast resources to work to research and assess the DEBKAfile disclosure, security was increased throughout Manhattan and on tunnels and bridges, with radioactivity sensors posted on vehicles, boats and helicopters.

The New York police came up with a further piece of information which was not sourced to DEBKA suggesting that a dirty bomb may go off on Friday evening around 34th Street in Manhattan, where the Empire State Building, Madison Square Garden and Macy’s department store are located.

At that point, something quite irrational happened: The NYPD’s sensible precautions generated a flood of media recriminations against… DEBKAfile. Unbridled, gratuitous assaults on this publication’s credibility came from the publications which missed the story, prominently Associated Press, the International Herald Tribune and FoxNews.

Reuters, to its credit, covered the episode fairly and professionally.

With regard to DEBKAfile’s record, our readers may recall that in 2003, our counter-terror sources exposed the massive recruitment campaign al Qaeda ran worldwide for an army of jihadis to fight US forces in Iraq under the command of a Jordanian terrorist called Abu Musab al Zarqawi.

Again, in 2005 - and up until the present - we warned that al Qaeda was building networks in Egyptian Sinai and the Gaza Strip.

Had the powers-that-be responded in timely fashion to these advance alerts, the situation in both troubled places might have evolved differently.