President Bush, in his first full news conference since March, warned today that there was a "real threat" of a new terror attack, possibly with hijacked airliners, but said he felt confident that it would be thwarted. "The threat is a real threat," Mr. Bush said, when asked about a warning from the Transportation Security Administration of possible plans by Al Qaeda militants to hijack commercial airlines in Australia, Europe or the United States. "We have got some data that indicates that they would like to use flights, international flights for example," he said, adding that Al Qaeda tended to "use the methodologies that worked in the past."
| Unless they can come up with new ones. But we do know they go for booms... |
"I'm confident we will thwart the attempts," he said. Separately, however, law-enforcement officials said that they were still assessing the credibility of the latest threats, and did not increase the government's threat level. |