U.S. cities brace for possible terror strike

High levels of corroboration support the intelligence.
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
WASHINGTON -- In Newport, R.I., the high cost of public security is putting this July's Tall Ships festival in question.
In Pennsylvania, state troopers are begging Gov. Ed Rendell to keep funding extra police positions established in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
In Arkansas, the state is combining revenue bonds and federal anti-terrorism grants to help pay for a statewide wireless public-safety communications system.
All across the United States, authorities are preparing for a summer they worry could be both hot and dangerous.
Their efforts will only be spurred by the announcement by federal officials that Al-Qaida probably has operatives in place in the United States who may be preparing a large-scale attack timed to affect the November election.
Given that Al-Qaida's intentions have long been known, Wednesday's added emphasis might be particularly important.
"Either it's political, or they have serious intelligence," says Juliette Kayyem, a homeland-security expert at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.
U.S. officials said Wednesday that a continuous stream of new and credible information indicates that the threat of a terrorist attack is high.
Issue of credibility
The information is not unlike that seen in the past and consists at least partly of chatter on Islamic Web sites and other anti-U.S. forums. But the intelligence is thought to be credible and is backed by high levels of corroboration. A high-profile target is likely in part because terror groups think that the Madrid train bombings helped influence the Spanish election, bringing to power a government that pledged to withdraw Spanish troops from Iraq.
The more spectacular the attack, the more influence Al-Qaida might have on the November elections -- at least, that may be terror groups' thinking.
At the same time, the FBI remains concerned that soft targets such as shopping malls offer an easier opportunity to terrorists than, say, a security-conscious political convention.
"My concern is the parallel attack that occurs in the same city at the same time," said Kayyem.
Raising public awareness of the possibility of attacks during the summer months is important, say other experts. People may be less aware of danger while they're on vacation. And in any case in recent months, the focus on Iraq may have made Americans more complacent about safety in their own country.
What one expert says
"It could be subway stations, malls ... a series where you get the whole country in a panic," says Bo Dietl, a security consultant and head of Beau Dietl & amp; Associates in New York City. "They'll hit different places."
Yet this week's warning may seem a bit superfluous for law-enforcement officials in the most obvious target locations -- Boston (because of the Democratic convention), Washington and New York.
New York, for instance, has remained at "level orange," or a high state of alert, even when the rest of the country dropped a notch to level yellow. Police guard crucial bridges and tunnels, pulling over and searching almost all trucks before they drive the structures.
New York and Vermont announced a pilot program Tuesday to link state and local law enforcement to the FBI to receive real-time information on terrorism threats, as well as on federal databases.