The President and the Plot

May 23, 2007 — -- President Bush used his commencement address at the U.S. Coast Guard Academy Wednesday to roll out once highly classified information on alleged al Qaeda plots to attack the United States.

Specifically, Bush outlined a plot that connected Osama bin Laden and the head of al Qaeda in Iraq to terror plans intended to hit U.S. interests and the United States itself.

Bush said that the United States had broken up a plot that had targeted "military academies" just like the one where he was delivering the speech.

"It has never been declassified before, certainly never acknowledged by the president before publicly," said White House spokesman Tony Fratto.

The president outlined several plans that he said U.S. authorities had thwarted, including a plan to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, and another aviation attack that involved "hijacking multiple airplanes and then crashing them into targets in the United States."

He revealed a few new details of these plots, but much had already been reported.

In January of this year, ABC's Pierre Thomas reported that "documents captured in a raid on an al Qaeda safe house in Iraq revealed the group was planning terrorist operations in the U.S."

Thomas' report continued: "Sources tell ABC News the documents show al Qaeda in Iraq was developing a plan to slip terrorists into the U.S. using student visas, the same technique used by the 9/11 hijackers. According to officials familiar with the documents, the U.S. has the names of as many as 20 suspects who apparently had been picked to carry out the attack."