Among the juiciest details released after the successful US operation to kill Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden last weekend was the mention that the military took hard drives from the compound—"10 hard drives, 5 computers and more than 100 storage devices which includes discs, DVDs and thumb drives." Investigators have been poring through those files, and have now revealed that Al Qaeda had been considering attacking the US rail system on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.
The document in question, which is from February 2010, shows that the terrorists wanted to "tip a train by tampering with the rails so that the train would fall off the track at either a valley or a bridge." Since the attacks on September 11th 2001, Al Qaeda has successfully targeted trains and railways in Spain, Britain and India. And last year, Al Qaeda operative Najibulllah Zazi admitted to being a part of a terrorist plan to blow himself up on the subway. But a senior homeland-security official told the Post that the rail plot was far too vague to translate into action because no actual plan had been formulated.
"As far as we can tell, it didn't even get into the planning stages. There is no evidence so far that this plot was approved or moved further," one law enforcement source told the News. They also insisted that there is no plan to raise the terror-alert level. Another source said that the train plot was found in handwritten notes, not the computer files: "That this kind of 'brainstorming' idea was among Bin Laden's materials indicates he may have been more involved in the operational debate than many thought."
Even if the plan was only in preliminary stages, or too difficult for the fractured organization to pull off in their current incarnation, officials admitted that the vulnerability of the nation's rail system is real. NYC commuters acknowledged that fact as well: “We’re vulnerable. We don’t get checked. We have the freedoms we have and obviously that would leave us exposed to an attack,” Bridget McAlphin told CBS.
