Al Qaeda still capable of attack like Sept 11, says CIA head

5.00pm

WASHINGTON - CIA Director George Tenet said today that despite strides made against al Qaeda it remained capable of conducting an attack on the scale of September 11, 2001, and he warned of dangers from broader anti-American sentiment among Muslim extremists.

"We are still at war," Tenet said at an annual Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on worldwide threats. Al Qaeda remained committed to attacking the United States and its allies, he added.

"Across the operational spectrum -- air, maritime, special weapons -- we have time and again uncovered plots that are chilling," Tenet said.

Authorities had uncovered aircraft plots that included new plans to recruit pilots and evade new security measures in Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe, he said.

"Even catastrophic attacks on the scale of 9/11 remain within al Qaeda's reach," Tenet said.

Al Qaeda was blamed for the September 11 hijacked aircraft attacks that killed about 3000 people. US forces have been hunting down members of the network but have not yet found leader Osama bin Laden, believed to be hiding in the mountainous border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Tenet said al Qaeda continued to lose safe havens from which to operate and bin Laden "has gone deeper underground."

Pakistani troops on Tuesday detained 25 people in raids on hide-outs of al Qaeda and Taleban militants in a remote tribal area near the Afghan border.

Also, an audiotape of bin Laden's deputy Ayman al-Zawahri, which the CIA said was probably authentic, was broadcast on Tuesday by Al Jazeera television in which he warned President George W Bush to prepare for more attacks.

FBI Director Robert Mueller described al Qaeda as flexible and adaptable with the capability to strike "with little or no warning" inside the United States and overseas.

"There are strong indications that al Qaeda will revisit missed targets until they succeed, such as they did with the World Trade Centre," Mueller said. "The list of missed targets now includes the White House as well as the Capitol."

But even if al Qaeda were not a factor, the network had spread its ideology depicting the United States as Islam's greatest enemy to other Muslim extremist groups, ensuring that "a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future -- with or without al Qaeda in the picture," Tenet said.

"As al Qaeda reels from our blows, other extremist groups within the movement it influenced have become the next wave of the terrorist threat. Dozens of such groups exist," he said.

Al Qaeda continues to seek chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, and its programme to produce anthrax was one of the most immediate threats, Tenet said. He also warned of "a heightened risk of poison attacks."

US intelligence officials at the hearing warned about the necessity of preventing Iraq from developing into a haven for terrorism. Authorities must prevent loosely connected foreign fighters from "coalescing into a cohesive terrorist organisation," Tenet said.

Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defence Intelligence Agency, said he believed elements of Saddam Hussein's former regime were responsible for the majority of anti-coalition attacks in Iraq.

Still, foreign fighters including al Qaeda remained a threat and may be behind suicide attacks that caused a high number of casualties, he said.

"Left unchecked, Iraq has the potential to serve as a training ground for the next generation of terrorists," Jacoby said.

The committee will hear next week from Tenet about prewar intelligence estimates that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when none have been found since the US invasion.

"People voted to authorise use of force based on what we read in these reports," Senator Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, said. "In terms of weaponisation and deployment and then finding nothing, it's a pretty bitter pill to swallow."

- REUTERS