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| NYC and DC try to explain different views of subway threat |
| 2005-10-08 |
| Officials in New York and Washington sought to explain on Friday why each made starkly different public statements as the news spread on Thursday about the threat to the New York City subway system, describing an apparent gap in perception brought on by different agencies' different roles. "It is very different being an analyst in Washington looking at data as opposed to being here in New York where you have to take responsibility to protect people's lives," Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said in Brooklyn on Friday. Mr. Bloomberg issued his warning on Thursday based on information that the Department of Homeland Security was publicly dismissing as being of "doubtful credibility." He suggested that the F.B.I. and New York officials were taking similar approaches - Mr. Bloomberg made the announcement with an F.B.I. official at his side - while the Department of Homeland Security was being overly cautious. "The F.B.I. attached more credibility to a lot of this information than other agencies," Mr. Bloomberg said. "That's just a fact of life. You'll never get consensus in the intelligence community on any one thing." A senior United States counterterrorism official in Washington, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly, echoed Mr. Bloomberg's statements when he said on Thursday that "obviously, when you're in New York, even if the information is not rock solid, you've got to take it seriously." But the official was far more skeptical of the threat itself, saying that intelligence officials who have sifted through the F.B.I. interrogation reports from Iraq that prompted the initial warnings believe "there are real questions about the credibility" of the information. In fact, the sense of alarm in New York was still being viewed with some astonishment on Friday in Washington, where counterterrorism officials described the differences as the latest indicator of a rivalry between two power centers. While the New York Police Department has established itself as an authority on counterterrorism matters after the Sept. 11 attacks, its approach is still viewed as primarily parochial by federal officials who say that New York officials sometimes overreact to potential threats. "I don't think any people should be scared," said a federal law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the case publicly. "I would take what Bloomberg said at face value. We looked at the information, we developed it, we provided it to the New York officials, and we let them determine how they need to react in terms of their own defense measures." A police official in New York who has been informed about the threat said the department does not have the time to carefully vet a threat to determine whether it is serious before acting. "We can't wait for certainty," the official said. "It doesn't have to be a certainty for us to act." The reserved response adopted by the Department of Homeland Security reflects a more sober approach that the department, under Secretary Michael Chertoff, has taken since he assumed control in February. Mr. Chertoff succeeded Tom Ridge, who at times was criticized, and even ridiculed, for pronouncements about threats facing the nation and safety steps the public should take, like buying duct tape. "I don't want to get up in public and say the sky is falling if it's not falling," Mr. Chertoff said in an interview with reporters in March. "What I want to resist is what I sometimes have observed over the years, is a temptation to feed the desire for information by putting something out that we are not in a position to speak about definitively." Given that mandate, on Thursday evening Mr. Chertoff's press secretary, Russ Knocke, did not hesitate to publicly play down the report that was causing alarm in New York, calling the threat "specific but noncredible" from information "of doubtful credibility." Senators Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut, the chairwoman and ranking Democrat on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, both said on Friday that they could understand why the federal government and New York City were reacting so differently to the report. "If I had been a New York official, I would have reacted in exactly the same way because the threat, unlike most, was so specific; there was so much detail in it, and that adds to its credibility even if you cannot confirm the validity of its source," Ms. Collins said, adding that she, like Mr. Lieberman, had been informed by federal officials about the matter. "D.H.S. has a different role, because D.H.S. is evaluating threats across the board all the time against a wide variety of targets," Ms. Collins said. "It has a different responsibility than municipal officials. It is to be expected that occasionally state and local officials are going to reach a different conclusion than federal homeland security officials. It does not mean that any of them are wrong. It just means that they are looking at it from a different perspective." Mr. Lieberman said that this kind of split was going to happen, on occasion, given the nature of the threat in this post-cold-war era. "This is a situation where different people in positions of leadership will reach different conclusions about how to respond to threat information," Mr. Lieberman said. "To me, it is not a question of right or wrong. They both look at the same information and acted differently." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |