Terrorist Threat Level Unchanged

The Bush administration Saturday refrained from raising the nation’s terrorist threat level after scrutinizing a videotaped message from Osama bin Laden that warned Americans to stop threatening the security of Muslims.

In a rare Saturday news conference, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said that law enforcement officials were taking precautions to protect national security without escalating the threat level.

“We don’t have to go to orange to add additional security measures around the country,” he told reporters.

But one day after the all-news Arab network Al Jazeera broadcast a tape of Bin Laden speaking directly to the American people, Ridge did not rule out the possibility of raising the terrorist threat level this week.

“In the hours and the days ahead, we’ll increase our Coast Guard patrols of the harbors,” Ridge said. “We’ll change some of the inspection protocols at our ports of entry and our airports. We’ll work with our cities to reroute, as we’ve done from time to time in the past, hazard material, be it in truck or railroads, around some of our major urban areas.”

The FBI, meanwhile, posted excerpts of a videotape that surfaced last week from an individual identified as Azzam the American, warning that streets in America “will run red with blood.” The individual’s face was concealed by a headdress.

The FBI asked for the public’s help in identifying “anything in the voice, body language or other style” of either the subject of the video or the person asking questions off camera.

For much of the year, the nation has been at the elevated threat level of yellow -- “significant risk of terrorist attacks.” In August, officials raised the level to orange -- “high risk of terrorist attacks” -- for certain financial districts in New York, Washington and northern New Jersey, after disclosures that terrorists had conducted careful surveillance of certain buildings.

President Bush held a video conference with top foreign and domestic security advisors Saturday to confer about the effect and possible responses to Bin Laden’s videotaped message.

Participants in the conference included Ridge, Vice President Dick Cheney, national security advisor Condoleezza Rice, Homeland Security advisor Fran Townsend, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, CIA Director Porter J. Goss and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III.

Some Democrats have accused the Bush administration of using the terrorist threat level for political reasons. This month, Rob Willer, a Cornell University scholar, said his studies demonstrated that the president’s approval ratings had gotten a boost whenever the government had issued a terrorism alert.

But a decision to raise the alert is “driven by the intelligence, it’s driven by the information,” Ridge said Saturday. He encouraged Americans to vote Tuesday without undue concerns about terrorism.

“We want to make sure that people feel safe and comfortable about going to vote,” he said.

Two unnamed U.S. officials said the communique from Bin Laden did not contain a specific, new threat to Americans or U.S. interests, although the matter was still being reviewed.

“We’re still in the early stages of analysis. We’re continuing to review the tapes,” said one U.S. official, alluding both to the Bin Laden tape and the separate tape that appeared to depict an American jihadist threatening this country.

A second U.S. official who is familiar with the Bin Laden tape and the intelligence community’s analysis of it said authorities had not found any hidden messages that would indicate any kind of signal for an attack.

Asked Saturday about the possibility of raising the level from yellow to orange, a White House spokesman suggested the matter was under review.

“Remember, we’re in an increased period of risk already and we have taken a number of steps related to that, some of which you see and some of which are not seen,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said.

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Times staff writers Edwin Chen and Maura Reynolds in Green Bay, Wis., Richard Simon in Nazareth, Pa., and Josh Meyer and Johanna Neuman in Washington contributed to this report.