Tuesday, August 10, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

EDITORIAL: Keeping Las Vegans in the dark

East Coast terror targets get armed police. Vegas isn't worth a fruit basket

If anyone wondered what the 9-11 Commission was talking about when their recent report cited a lack of communication between levels of government when it comes to terrorist threat assessments, they need look no further than Las Vegas.

When Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan was arrested in Pakistan last month, his computer was found to contain years-old surveillance of five financial buildings in New York, Washington and Newark. This was judged adequately alarming to justify the Department of Homeland Security elevating the threat level in those cities, this month, to "orange."

But it is now known two different terrorist surveillance videotapes -- one in the possession of an al-Qaida cell broken up by Spanish authorities in 2002, and another found in possession of members of a Detroit cell who were convicted in Michigan last summer -- feature other notable American landmarks, including Las Vegas casinos.

Nor can this be shrugged off as the mere accidental inclusion of some irrelevant vacation footage. It is now known al-Qaida operatives are instructed to bracket their "casing the joint" videos with other footage designed to make the tapes look like typical vacation souvenir footage. But both the Spanish and Detroit videos show "surveillance of casinos in Las Vegas ... the World Trade Center, and Disneyland in California" including "nearly identical footage of security, information on how cars could access the landmarks, and other footage that could be useful in staging an attack," The Associated Press now reports.

It appears Clark County Sheriff Bill Young was made aware of the videos by federal authorities -- but basically told to keep all the information hush-hush. (Reached over the weekend, Undersheriff Doug Gillespie said he was unaware of the Las Vegas footage recovered in Spain. He now says he did indeed know about it.)

Even agents with the Las Vegas field office of the FBI said over the weekend they were unaware of the second videotape.

Here again, it might indeed prove wasteful, inappropriate or unnecessarily disruptive to place hundreds of police officers with automatic rifles at all the entrances to every major Nevada casino. But local authorities can hardly weigh what steps are and are not appropriate, if they're not even briefed on the intelligence.

The contrast between the effort and expense which have gone into such measures in New York and Washington, versus the "who cares?" shrug which apparently greeted the similar level of surveillance for Disneyland and Las Vegas casinos, including the MGM Grand, is certainly marked.

Especially when Youssef Hmimssa, a co-conspirator who turned state's evidence in the Detroit trial last year, said one of the defendants referred to Las Vegas as the "city of Satan," expressing disgust that Muslims engage in "sinful" behavior here.

Thank goodness there's no component of moral outrage and fundamentalist Muslim fanaticism in al-Qaida's choice of targets, eh?

Las Vegans can be forgiven if they begin to wonder whether the authorities in Washington don't partially share bin Laden's tendency to rank targets based on their links to "Satan." Some bank in Newark, N.J., shows up on a surveillance tape? Heavens, it's a vital facility, deserving a full orange alert and around-the-clock police protection! Why, a terror strike there could paralyze the economy! But the casinos of Las Vegas? Only a nest of sinners; let them take their chances in blissful ignorance of any newly revealed threat.