Obama Accused of Inflating EU Terror Threat

[Bush was a better liar.]

by Tucker Reals

Senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told The Guardiannewspaper that President Obama’s administration has deliberately exaggerated the current terror threat to European cities from militants in Pakistan for political reasons.”I will not deny the fact that there may be internal political dynamics, including the forthcoming midterm American elections,” Pakistan’s high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, told the paper. “If the Americans have definite information about terrorists and al Qaeda people, we should be provided [with] that and we could go after them ourselves.”

Hasan, whose job is equivalent to that of ambassador, has a reputation for making controversial, sometimes incendiary comments, but he is a veteran diplomat with close ties to the Pakistani political leadership.

Above: French police stand guard at the Gare du Nord train station in Paris, Oct. 6, 2010.

He called the widely reported threat of “commando-style” sieges being planned for London and other major cities in France and Germany, “a mixture of frustrations, ineptitude and lack of appreciation of ground realities,” on the part of U.S. officials seeking to justify a dramatic increase in drone missile strikes against militant targets on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan.

Hasan (pictured at left) said the increase in missile strikes, and thus the terror alert to justify them, were born of the Obama administration’s rush to show some degree of success in the war against Taliban and al Qaeda-linked militants in the region, and were “obviously” linked to the U.S. president’s demand to begin pulling American forces out of Afghanistan in 2011.European intelligence officials also told The Guardian that the White House was behind the dire warnings against travel to tourist hotspots in Britain, France and Germany. The officials essentially accuse the Americans of weaving together loose evidence of militant intentions to formulate a threat that, if it existed at all, was far from becoming a real danger.

“To stitch together [the terror plot claims] in a seamless narrative is nonsensical,” one source, whom the paper dubbed “well-placed,” told The Guardian.

Even as European government’s joined the U.S. in issuing alerts and calling for increased vigilance, the vague nature of the warnings led many analysts (and journalists alike) to question the validity and usefulness of the public information.

At all times, the battery of anonymous intelligence and law enforcement officials quoted by news organizations on the threat made it clear there was, in fact, no “imminent” threat. The word “aspirational” was used many times to qualify the nature of the alleged plot — an effort by the unnamed people-in-the-know to qualify their own remarks even as they were made.

Nonetheless, the sense from security officials, particularly those in the U.S., was that the threat was very real and not to be ignored.

CBS News homeland security correspondent Bob Orr was told by multiple sources in intelligence and law enforcement that they were more concerned about the present threat in Europe than they had been about any other potential danger since the 2006 liquid plane bomb plot was uncovered.

Those sources told Orr the threat had been traced back to core members of the al Qaeda leadership, who have “given marching orders” for operatives in Europe to attack when and where they can. The plot was even approved by Osama bin Laden himself, according to a report on CNN.

The problem, said Orr’s sources, was that the intelligence being garnered from the field was too non-specific for law enforcement agencies to give warnings or boost security around any locations or infrastructure in particular.

One Western diplomat in Pakistan told CBS News’ Farhan Bokhari on Thursday that the terror alert had been triggered by U.S. intelligence officials seeing, “a convergence of information from different sides pointing towards the same threat.”

That diplomat, who did not wish to be identified, even by nationality, added that, “the Europeans are now seeing where the U.S. was coming from.”

European officials — who presumably have access to much of the same intelligence as EU nations and the U.S. government claim to work together to confront the threat posed by Islamic militant groups — have remained far less convinced by the evidence.

As CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips reported on Sept. 29, one well-informed British source went so far as to tell CBS News that he’d been told by law enforcement officials the reports of a foiled plot were, “a load of old rubbish which have been planted to justify the increased drone attacks taking place in the tribal areas” of Pakistan.

Beware of Governments Trumpeting Terror Threats

Germany’s Interior Minister even called the reported terror threat to his country “hypothetical”.

None of the officials who spoke to CBS News or The Guardian sought to downplay the threat posed by European nationals who travel to Pakistan or other countries to be trained by al Qaeda or its affiliates. But as the British newspaper points out, doubts over how far into the planning process a militant suspect was when a U.S. missile blew him up may increase international scrutiny of the CIA’s officially-nonexistent drone strike program.

As many as eight of the militants killed in the recent strikes — directly linked by intelligence officials to the European terror threat — were German or British nationals.