Home > Europe Takes New Alerts With Grain of Salt
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
PARIS. Britain aside, the response in Europe to the latest announcement of terror threats in the United States has ranged from official calm to unofficial cynicism.
Since the Bush administration raised the terror alert to orange for five financial targets in and around New York and Washington, European governments have left their risk assessments unchanged.
Although British officials have arrested a dozen suspected Islamic militants, the possible links between those arrests and the American terror alerts remain unclear.
And while Germany, France and Britain have all confirmed that they remained on high alert, as they have been since coordinated train bombings in Madrid killed 191 people on March 11, they said their national intelligence services had unearthed nothing to suggest that terror attacks on European soil were more likely than before.
In a measure of how little the latest alerts raised concern in Europe, the European Union’s counterterrorism director, Gijs de Vries, remained on vacation.
"If there were a crisis, we would adapt our security situation, but for the moment that is not considered necessary," said Isabel Schmitt-Falckenberg, a spokeswoman at the German Interior Ministry.
A spokesman for the British Home Office echoed her comment, saying, "the threat is continuous and high, but unchanged," and France’s national police service said the country’s security forces were operating under the same instructions put in place after the Madrid attacks.
Some European counterterrorism experts have said that a highly publicized threat three months ahead of the presidential elections on Nov. 2 needed special scrutiny.
Rolf Tophoven, director of Germany’s Institute for Terrorism Research and Security Policy, said: "You shouldn’t forget that there is an election campaign and that in times of crisis people tend to rally around the incumbent government. This is not a bad thing for Bush."
Mr. Tophoven criticized the "inflation of terror warnings" in the United States, saying it risks desensitizing Americans at home and distracting the world from more imminent terrorist targets elsewhere.
"You have to ask how credible and serious this latest threat really is ," he said. "The danger is that repeated warnings are counterproductive in terms of people’s sensibility to terrorism. And the U.S. must watch out so as to not miss the real terror hot spot."
Much likelier targets than American territory are Muslim countries that have been America’s allies, he said, pointing to Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, where several arrests of suspected Qaeda agents have been made in recent months. Europe, with its open borders and extensive train network, also appears to be more vulnerable than the United States, Mr. Tophoven said.
"Since Madrid we have a heightened risk level in Europe, and the attacks on Christian targets in Iraq was the most recent warning signal," he said. "For militant Islamists, Rome is the center of heresy."
Rome, with the Vatican enclave within its walls and as the seat of a government that has supported the Bush administration in the invasion of Iraq, has received threats from militant Islamists at least twice. On Sunday, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claim links to Al Qaeda, threatened attacks in Rome unless Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi withdraws Italy’s 2,700 troops from Iraq within two weeks. About 4,000 Italian soldiers have been brought in to protect Rome’s ancient sites alongside police forces. A security source told Reuters that vigilance would remain at "a very high" level around St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican.
In Germany, the risk level remains "very high" for American and British nationals as well as for Jews living in or visiting Germany, and "high" for Germans and others. French security forces remained on "high" alert across the country and "very high" alert at airports and major train stations, a police spokesman said.