(The St. Louis Post-Dispatch posted the following article by Bill Bryan on its website on March 26.)
ST. LOUIS, Mo. — St. Louis police have assigned officers to watch two Mississippi River bridges 24 hours a day after a captured al-Qaida leader told interrogators about what Chief Joe Mokwa described Wednesday as a “generic threat.”
“We have uniformed officers looking for anything unusual,” Mokwa said. He declined to say which of the seven bridges are getting the attention or how the two were chosen.
Homeland security officials have long recognized the Poplar Street Bridge as a potential target. It carries three interstates — 55, 64 and 70 — and accommodates about 35 percent of the car and truck traffic across the Mississippi in the St. Louis region.
St. Louis also has two rail-only bridges, the Merchants and MacArthur, which get little public notice but play a vital role in national commerce.
Mokwa said the FBI alerted him about two weeks ago. The information came from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, a high-ranking al-Qaida member who was captured March 1 in Pakistan.
Mohammed reportedly told officials that al-Qaida was interested in hitting symbolic landmarks and named the White House, the Israeli embassy in Washington, the Sears Tower in Chicago and bridges in Manhattan, St. Louis and San Francisco.
Thomas E. Bush III, special agent in charge of the FBI’s office in St. Louis, confirmed the report Wednesday and emphasized, “There are no specific threats to any bridge in the St. Louis area.”
He added, “There has been a lot of nonspecific information that has come out but never substantiated. In this case there’s no timetable given, nothing specific.
“You have to be careful in situations like this not to overreact. You don’t want to create panic. There have been a number of these kinds of reports, and you have to take them in context.”
But even vague threats are handled seriously, Bush said. “You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. It’s better to err on the side of caution.”
The FBI “took necessary steps” that included notifying local police, he said.
Mokwa said that after the report, police photographed and studied the bridges. He would not discuss how officers are monitoring them.
Illinois State Police Capt. Richard A. Woods, commander of District 11 in Collinsville, said he was aware of the terrorist alert, but he declined to say how his agency might be involved.
In June, security at the Edward Jones Dome downtown was tightened after reports that people with ties to unspecified terrorist groups had used an Internet site to gather information about it and the RCA Dome in Indianapolis.
Bill Eubanks, then special agent in charge of the FBI here, called that information “very vague.” Nothing came of it.Besides the Poplar Street, Merchants and MacArthur, there are four other Mississippi River bridges in the city. Two, the New Chain of Rocks (I-270) and King bridges, carry cars and trucks. The Eads is used only by MetroLink trains, although it has a road deck for vehicular traffic under reconstruction. The McKinley is closed for repairs.
There are two more Mississippi River bridges in the region that are not in the city: the Clark Bridge, linking St. Charles County to Alton, and the Jefferson Barracks Bridge, linking south St. Louis County to Monroe County.