Officials - No evidence of imminent terror attack

The Associated Press

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has discovered no evidence of imminent plans by terrorists to attack U.S. financial buildings, nearly two weeks after the government issued startling warnings about such possible threats, a White House official said Thursday.

Some documents and computer files seized in al-Qaida raids showing surveillance of U.S. financial buildings had been accessed for unknown purposes this spring, months later than authorities had previously disclosed, the official said.

Officials had said earlier that some files had been reviewed as recently as January.

The seized records included surveillance reports of financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark, N.J., during 2000 and 2001, which prompted dramatic warnings Aug. 1 from the White House about possible threats to those buildings.

But nothing in the documents themselves has suggested any attack was planned soon, the officials said.

"I have not seen an indication of an imminent operation," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity with reporters from nearly a dozen news organizations. Investigators are still poring over volumes of the seized information.

The White House homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, told "Fox News Sunday" over the weekend that authorities believe discovery of the surveillance has disrupted all or part of al-Qaida's plans to carry out such attacks.

The FBI and local police still haven't determined whether surveillance of the financial buildings was performed by a single person or several people, and the FBI has not yet identified anyone involved in the surveillance, the White House official said Thursday, adding that the detailed reconnaissance indicated "an awful lot of time and energy put into it."

Another administration official, also speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White House still would have issued the terror alerts that it did nearly two weeks ago even had it known at the time that the surveillance documents did not point to an imminent operation.

The administration remains deeply concerned about information uncovered separately in the spring suggesting al-Qaida was plotting a major attack inside the United States -- perhaps in August or September -- to disrupt the elections, the first official said.

None of the documents or computer files recovered in the recent raids in Pakistan mentioned any election-related plots, the same official said.

This official said unspecified intelligence indicates al-Qaida's plans for an attack before the election were "more than merely aspirational" but declined to be more specific because it might reveal the information's source. Timing was unclear, the official said, acknowledging that intelligence agencies "wish we had a sense."

Senior U.S. officials -- including Townsend, Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and national security adviser Condoleezza Rice -- have expressed similar concerns since March about possible al-Qaida efforts to disrupt the U.S. elections.

Townsend said Sunday on CBS' "Face the Nation" that she believes the surveillance of the U.S. financial buildings might be related to the election-period threat.