Progress

Looks like we got a few more:

Al-Hindi was among 13 men, ages 19 to 32, arrested in raids late Tuesday in London, the nearby towns of Watford and Luton, and Blackburn in northwestern England. One man was freed Wednesday without charge. The others were being questioned at a London police station “on suspicion of being concerned in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism,” police said, according to the Associated Press.

The arrests in Pakistan that led investigators to al-Hindi began in June with the apprehension by Pakistani paramilitary forces of Mussad Aruchi, an al Qaeda operative. The operation was supervised by the CIA, officials said. Aruchi, described as a nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, told interrogators he “was sure that al Qaeda would hit New York or Washington pretty soon.” He is also a cousin of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, who was convicted of planning and carrying out an attack on the World Trade Center in 1993.

Aruchi’s capture led to the arrest of Muhammad Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani, in the city of Lahore on July 13, and to the apprehension last week of Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian wanted in connection with the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

Bush administration officials said the terror alert for financial sectors in Washington, New York and Newark was based in part on the contents of a laptop computer, disks and other materials seized during an arrest of an al Qaeda fugitive in Pakistan in late July showing that al Qaeda operatives had conducted detailed surveillance of the five buildings. U.S. officials did not make clear until Tuesday that the surveillance was conducted three to four years ago and that authorities were not sure whether it had continued.

I wonder if someone has told the wingnuts, who as recently as yesterday were stating that the terror warnings were elevated only for political reasons.