Home > In Europe, latest alert sets off no alarms
by Katrin Bennhold
PARIS The response in Europe to the latest terror threats in the United States has ranged from official calm to unofficial cynicism.
Two days after the Bush administration raised the terror alert to "orange" - one notch below top level - for five iconic financial targets in and around New York and Washington, European governments left their risk assessments unchanged.
While officials from Germany, France and Britain 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 national secret services had unearthed nothing to suggest that terror attacks on European soil were more likely than before. In a measure of how little impact the latest alerts had in Europe, the European Union’s counterterrorism czar, 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 at the German Interior Ministry.
A spokesman for the British Home Office echoed her comment, saying that "the threat is continuous and high, but unchanged," and France’s national police service said the country’s security forces were operating under the regime put in place after the Madrid attacks.
Tom Ridge, the U.S. homeland security secretary, said Sunday that the terrorist organization Al Qaeda appeared to have collected information on five high-profile financial targets and might be planning truck bombings.
But as trucks were kept away from the area around Wall Street in Lower Manhattan and employees of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in Washington waited in line for extensive security checks, some European terrorism experts also pointed out 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."
He criticized the "inflation of terror warnings in the U.S.," which he said 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 - the danger is that repeated warnings are counterproductive in terms of people’s sensibility to terrorism," Tophoven said. "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 Qaeda arrests 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, he 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," Tophoven said. "For militant Islamists, Rome is the center of heresy."
Home to the Vatican, headquarters of the Roman Catholic Church and a government that supported the Bush administration in the invasion of Iraq, Rome has received threat letters from militant Islamists at least twice. On Sunday, the Abu Hafs al-Masri Brigades, which claim links to Al Qaeda, threatened attacks unless Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi withdraws Italy’s 2,700 troops from Iraq within two weeks. About 4,000 soldiers have been brought in to protect the sites alongside police forces. A security source told Reuters that vigilance would remain at "a very high" level around St. Peter’s Basilica, Christendom’s largest church building.
In Germany, the risk level remains "very high" for American and British nationals as well as for Jewish Germans or visitors, and "high" for Germans and others, while French security forces remained on "orange" ( high alert) across the country and "red" ( very high alert) at airports and major train stations, a police spokesman said. Some U.S. banks in London’s financial district are tightening security, the BBC reported.
Some European governments were assailed by opponents for not being prepared for another March 11-style attack on the Continent. In Britain, David Davis, the Home Affairs spokesman of the Conservative Party, criticized the governing Labour Party for failing to spell out concrete contingency plans.
The train bombings in Madrid were the first large-scale attack by terrorists believed to be linked to Al Qaeda on European soil. The Continent’s disparate security and intelligence services have fought a variety of largely individual terrorist threats for decades, from the Irish Republican Army in Britain to the Red Army Brigades in Italy and Basque terrorists in Spain. But analysts seem to agree that they are less prepared for global terrorism than America is almost three years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Daniel Keohane, a defense expert at the Center for European Reform in London, said Europe could do with a bit more U.S.-style preparation: "When you’re looking at contingency planning, Europeans are behind the U.S.," he said. "But they are also more reticent to jump to conclusions about threats."
International Herald Tribune