New York authorities and the FBI have been paying particular attention to securing the bridges into Manhattan, especially the Brooklyn Bridge, which is an icon and a vital economic artery.
A senior Administration official says the U.S. is no closer to finding Osama bin Laden after Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's March 1 capture than it was before.
"It's Mohammed who may hold the greatest intelligence treasures," writes TIME's editor-at-large Michael Elliott, in a story on the hunt for bin Laden, headlined "The Biggest Fish of Them All" in this week's TIME magazine... "If I had to choose who was a bigger catch, Osama or Khalid Shaikh," says a senior Pakistani intelligence official tells TIME, "I'd say Khalid Shaikh."
Story online at: https://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101030317-430651,00.html A senior U.S. counterterrorism official tells TIME Mohammed's name came up so often in the communication intercepts that triggered last month's orange alert that he seemed capable of simultaneously orchestrating several different plots in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Rohan Gunaratna, author of an admired study of al-Qaeda, says Mohammed's arrest has "cut al-Qaeda's operational ability by 50% at least in the next one to two years." Last week's classified FBI Intelligence Bulletin said the arrest "deals a severe blow to al-Qaeda's ability to plan and carry out attacks against the United States." Mohammed, speaking to his interrogators last week, referred to himself as the Brain, according to a U.S. intelligence source.
Mohammed was interrogated first by Pakistani authorities, who were anxious, says a source, that he might have been planning an assassination attempt on President Pervez Musharraf. A few days later, according to Pakistani sources, Mohammed was flown in a U.S. Chinook helicopter to the American air base at Bagram, Afghanistan, north of Kabul. U.S. sources will not confirm that Mohammed was taken to Bagram, but an Afghan general tells TIME that he saw Mohammed taken off the helicopter, hooded and manacled. He may or may not still be there. A Jordanian official has told TIME that at the end of last week, Mohammed was being held and questioned in Amman, Jordan. U.S. sources will not comment on the claim. # # #