Sunday, October 23, 2005
WASHINGTON — A White House list of 10 terrorist plots disrupted by the United States has confused counterterrorism experts and officials who say they cannot distinguish between the importance of some incidents on the list and others that were left off.
Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, "elevated" risk of attack, to orange, "high" risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.
The president made it "sound like well-hatched plans. I don't think they fall into that category," said a former CIA official involved in counterterrorism during that period.
"The problem with these lists is that we don't know the criteria," said Bruce Hoffman, a Rand Corp. terrorism expert. When the incidents do not correspond to elevated threat levels, "it runs the risk of were we just crying wolf then?"
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