From a dry run to a dry hole for plane plot

NY Times:

American intelligence officials said today that they and their British counterparts had been tracking terrorists for months before the schemers were rounded up in Britain, and that they could not say positively that all the plotters had yet been caught.

“It was not just a speculative exercise, by any stretch of the imagination,” Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson of the Homeland Security Department said in a telephone interview after two dozen suspects were rounded up in London and its suburbs and in the Midlands of Britain. He called it a “serious, sustained and diabolical plot,” one that was close to being carried out.

In recent days, he said, plotters began investigating nonstop flights from Britain to the United States. An American counter-terrorism official said they planned “a dry run” in the next couple of days and, if they could get on several flights at the same time, planned to carry out the attack within days.

The hijackers of Sept. 11, 2001, also did meticulous research on airline schedules and took numerous rehearsal trips in the United States.

...


Their MO comeback to trap them. Do you think that the Brits were intercepting their communications with the terrist in Pakistan or elsewhere? I hope so, and I do not care whether they had a warrant. Enemy communications are not entitiled to any privaleges, and if we extend them a lot of people will wind up dead.

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