Word: alerting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...supervisor complained that there might be plenty of men named Zacarias Moussaoui in France; how did the agents know this was the same man? (The agents checked the Paris phone books and found but one Moussaoui.) At another point the field office tried to bypass their bosses altogether and alert the CIA's Counterterrorism Center; Rowley says FBI officials chastised the agents for going behind their backs. She reserves her toughest words for a supervisor who repeatedly belittled the French intelligence on the case. Rowley claims that in late August the supervisor did forward the FISA request to lawyers...
...when government officials issued a battery of vague and frightening warnings last week, all Americans could do was wait and worry. It was a kind of warning-signal whiplash, and it was exhausting. The fresh round of alerts began when Vice President Dick Cheney called the prospect of another major attack on the U.S. "very, very real" and suggested that suicide bombings are also a distinct possibility. Three other top Administration officials quickly echoed the fatalistic mantra. Their predictions weren't altogether new, but they contained hotter adjectives than Americans were used to. Before, new attacks were likely; now they...
While government officials portrayed the warnings as a rational response to perceived threats, the alert bonanza was too confounding to be dutifully accepted at face value. Democratic strategists questioned the timing, since the new threats had conveniently deflected attention from criticism about pre-9/11 intelligence failures. Were the warnings a ploy to unite the nation behind the White House? If not, then where was the anxiety coming from? And if the risks had truly escalated, why was the country still bathing in the glow of a "yellow" security alert--the midpoint of the five-level system established in March...
...anatomy of one such alert is telling. Last Monday night, the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force--a round-the-clock operation at the New York field office of the FBI--got a call from FBI headquarters. Abu Zubaydah, the highest al-Qaeda official to be captured by the U.S., had told interrogators that he had heard other Osama bin Laden loyalists discussing attacks on the Brooklyn Bridge, the Statue of Liberty and other U.S. landmarks. But, a federal law-enforcement official told TIME, Abu Zubaydah had said the conversations took place a while back and claimed he knew...
...call was made to New York City, but the ambiguity persisted. "We never viewed it as a warning or an alert, like, 'The bridge is going to get hit within the next two days,'" says an FBI official. "It was more like, 'Out of an abundance of caution, we're telling you this.' It was just historical, lower-priority stuff." New York Police Department representatives on the task force passed along the information to their supervisors, who called N.Y.P.D. commissioner Raymond Kelly. He decided to post officers at both the statue and the bridge and make random checks of cars...