Pre-9/11 Acts Led To Alerts

Officials Unsure Spying On Buildings Continued

--Washington Post

Reports That Led to Terror Alert Were Years Old, Officials Say

--New York Times

Bloody hell.

For the past 24 hours I've been sure there was something amiss about this story. I've done a lot of speculating -- most of which really doesn't hold up. But I think this is what I was groping for:

More than half a dozen government officials interviewed yesterday, who declined to be identified because classified information is involved, said that most, if not all, of the information about the buildings seized by authorities in a raid in Pakistan last week was about three years old, and possibly older.

"There is nothing right now that we're hearing that is new," said one senior law enforcement official who was briefed on the alert. "Why did we go to this level? . . . I still don't know that."

One piece of information on one building, which intelligence officials would not name, appears to have been updated in a computer file as late as January 2004, according to a senior intelligence official. But officials could not say yesterday whether that piece of data was the result of active surveillance by al Qaeda or came instead from information about the buildings that is publicly available.

Several officials also said that much of the information compiled by terrorist operatives about the buildings in Washington, New York and Newark was obtained through the Internet or other "open sources" available to the general public, including some floor plans.

The Post and Times articles still present the alert as a good-faith reaction to newly obtained, if mostly not new, information.

Well, maybe.