Europe Takes New Alerts With Grain of Salt
By KATRIN BENNHOLD,
International Herald Tribune
Published: August 6, 2004
PARIS, Aug. 5 - 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....
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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."...
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/06/international/europe/06europe.html
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