Subway terror plot an old story

UPI/Washington Times:

Reports currently roiling the airwaves about al-Qaida's design for a crude device to produce cyanide gas first surfaced more than two-and-a-half years ago.
"Al-Qaida terrorists have developed a crude device designed to spread deadly cyanide gas through the ventilation systems of crowded indoor facilities such as subways," reported investigative journalist Paul Sperry in November 2003, citing "a closely held security directive issued to law enforcement by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security" that month.
But the device only became famous last weekend, when it was introduced as the Mubtakker -- Arabic for "invention" -- in the centerpiece of a book excerpt published by Time magazine.
The book, "The One Percent Doctrine," by Pulitzer Prize winner Ron Suskind, says that designs for the device were found in February 2003 on a computer seized in Saudi Arabia after the arrest of a jihadist there, and that, a month later, U.S. intelligence separately uncovered an aborted plot to use several of them in an attack on the New York subway system.
After his November 2003 story for the right wing news and opinion Web site World Net Daily, Sperry -- now an editorial writer for Investors Business Daily -- wrote again about the device in his March 2005 book, "Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." He posted on his Web site, Sperryfiles.com, the entire homeland security threat advisory that had warned of it.
The advisory, dated Nov. 21, 2003 is a generalized warning to state and local first responders and industry groups about the continuing danger of al-Qaida terrorist attacks, at a time when many U.S. intelligence analysts believed that a strike against the United States was the inevitable apex of a rising arc of attacks by regional franchises of the terror group.

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Suskind clearly has better PR. Anyone that can make a two year old story look like a scoop certainly knows how to create a buzz. Some have suggested that his timing also coinsides with an effort by New York to squeeze more money out of Homeland Security, which makes the New York media more interested in his "scoop."