Friday, December 26, 2003

Mystery of the Orange Alert

The story of the cancellation of the Air France flights due to fears of a terrorist attack presumably involving seizure of an aircraft has been widely reported. See Los Angeles Times, El Mundo, Washington Post.

The Post article linked above gives some pretty strong hints that French officials were skeptical of the American evidence, although they acted on it out of caution. Although some individuals were detained and questioned, apparently no suspects were arrested.

Josh Marshall has some more specifics about disagreements between French and American officials on this matter, linking to this BBC report and to this report from a Welsh news site. Marshall points out that we have reason to be disturbed by the continuing problems in coordination on counter-terrorism with countries that until very recently were generally considered our closest allies. As he puts it, "few things are more important than effective liaison and coordination between ours and our allies intelligence services. And if the choppy political waters are getting in the way, on either side, that's a big problem."

And I can't help but wonder, if we have intelligence that's good enough to ferret out information this specific on a terrorist plot, shouldn't we have enough information to make some arrests? I hope that the Congressional intelligence committees perform some serious oversight on these terrorist alerts. As the massive intelligence failure (combined with deliberate deception) over the Iraqi "weapons of mass destruction" showed, American intelligence isn't as good as it needs to be. And we need good intelligence to effectively combat terrorism.

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