Lawmakers question wisdom of FBI warning

Lawmakers confronted the Bush administration on Tuesday about its decision to put out an extraordinary terrorist warning earlier this week, questioning whether the FBI’s alert could do more to alarm than protect an already anxious public.

“Whenever general warnings are given, the people we represent don’t know what to do, and we don’t know how to advise them,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., said after a noontime meeting with Tom Ridge, the White House’s homeland security director. “You wonder what these warnings achieve, other than to create more fear.”

As that debate raged on Capitol Hill, law enforcement agencies nationwide moved to reassess security measures in response to the FBI warning issued Monday about the threat of possible attacks in the next week.

The Federal Aviation Administration put new restrictions in place on private and general aviation flights in the airspace around 86 sensitive nuclear sites. But many law enforcement agencies said they have already been at their highest states of alert for weeks and aren’t sure what more they can do.

In Los Angeles, the Los Angeles Police Department actually downgraded its alert status Tuesday after reviewing the FBI warning.

Still, the FBI’s latest warning clearly agitated some people already reeling from the 1-2 punch of the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare. Around the country, people making travel plans, going to sporting events and considering other options for the week peppered police on Tuesday with questions about how they should respond to the terrorist threat spotlighted by the FBI’s warning.

While some lawmakers praised the administration’s decision to issue a broad warning, others complained that the FBI alert was too vague to help protect people from terrorists.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, D-Conn., said Ridge got an earful from lawmakers in closed meetings on Capitol Hill. Dodd said the FBI’s threat announcement provided “a lot of noise, not a lot of clarity. ... It’s unfortunate.”

The FBI notified some 18,000 law enforcement agencies nationwide on Monday that it had received “credible” information that there could be more terrorist attacks in the next week. Federal authorities say they are taking additional steps to ensure extra vigilance at airports, power plants, border crossings and other sites that could be vulnerable to terrorists.

The warning, the second one of its kind issued this month, is believed to have grown out of concerns that operatives associated with Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network are still at large in the United States and could be planning further attacks. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, intelligence agencies have aggressively monitored electronic intercepts, exchanged information with foreign intelligence services and contacted past associates of al-Qaida in an effort to track possible terrorist movements.

Law enforcement officials refused to discuss the nature of the new intelligence. But Ridge told reporters Tuesday that the information came from “multiple sources.”

“The decibel level was louder (than in the past), and there were more sources,” Ridge said. “It was just a convergence of credible sources that occasioned the alert -- more than usual is all I can tell you.”

Administration officials, criticized for putting out a similarly vague warning Oct. 11, debated whether to publicize the latest threat assessment. But officials at the Justice Department, the FBI and the White House defended the final decision to go public with the threat.

“It’s a difficult and fine line that we walk,” Ridge acknowledged. “But I think America understands and, hopefully, appreciates that when there’s that kind of information available to us, we just share it with America, as incomplete as it might be.”

Sen. Robert F. Bennett, R-Utah, who backed the administration, acknowledged nonetheless that lawmakers are concerned about the cumulative effect of the warnings.

“If you cry wolf too many times -- you’ve all read the story, you know what happens,” Bennett told reporters.

Meanwhile, lawmakers continued to respond to the new sense of vulnerability created by last month’s attacks. Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt., and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., introduced legislation Tuesday that would spend $12 million annually to protect drinking water.

“Now is the time to move forward on this long-term plan to strengthen our water systems against terrorist threats,” Jeffords said.

And Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., whose office received an anthrax-laced letter earlier this month, defended the administration’s latest warning, saying that making information about such threats public is better than putting it out privately to police agencies and then risking “leaks or misunderstandings” once word filtered out.