Bush Administration Policies Foil Attack on JFK Airport

Hundreds, perhaps thousands of Americans alive today because of President Bush!

Imagine you lived in a United States where there was no Patriot Act, no monitoring of overseas communications between terrorists and their sympathizers in the United States and no aggressive interrogation of captured terrorists.

You might have woken up today to devastating news of a major bombing of fuel and airport facilities at JFK airport in New York City.

But you didn’t did you?

And residents of New York City, who suffered such horrible loss on September 11th, have been spared the loss that would surely have come from attacks on the Subway System, the trains connecting New York City to New Jersey and bombing of the Brooklyn Bridge or an attack against the Empire State Building.

You didn’t wake up to news that Fort Dix in New Jersey had been attacked and the sad news that U.S. troops had been killed on American soil.

You never suffered the anguish of losing family members in buildings targeted in Chicago, Los Angeles or Seattle. Or from dirty bombs or biological weapons unleashed in major American cities.

Neither did you wake up to learn that jet liners bound for America from Great Britain carrying thousands of innocent passengers had been blown out of the Sky.

There are numerous examples of plots that never happened because President Bush understands that his most important job is protecting American lives, not extending U.S. Constitutional protection to the people who would destroy the Constitution.

More on Foiled JFK Plot

• The indictment against the JFK plotters is here in PDF format. The major lead appears to come from a convicted drug dealer who cooperated in return for a lighter sentence. The source apparently knew the primary defendant Russell Defreitas, a US citizen native to Guyana and retired JFK employee, from a Brooklyn mosque. The informant helped the FBI and counter terrorism officials gather key evidence to other plotters in Guyana and Trinidad.
• Defreitas had contacts with co-defendant Abudl Kadir, a Guyanese citizen and former member of Parliament. Kadir Code named the plot "The Chicken Hatchery." Defreitas also used defendant Abdel Nur to facilitate an introduction to Jamaat Al Muslimeen, a radical terrorist organization in Trinidad which had attempted a bloody coup against the Trinidad government in 1990.
• Defreitas provided the informant key information revealing security weak points at JFK Airport and described how devastating the attack would be:"Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States,” he said in one of dozens of conversations secretly recorded during the 18-month investigation. “To hit John F. Kennedy, wow…. They love John F. Kennedy like he’s the man … If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice.”
• Kadir was arrested Friday after he had boarded a flight from Trinidad to Venezuela, from where he planned to go on to Iran.
• Mark J. Mershon, Assistant Director-in-Charge, FBI, New York Field Office, mentioned in his press statement this afternoon the fact that Iranian agents had been expelled from the U.S. for past surveillance activities. No word on any further connection here.