CIA leader: Al-Qaida still a threat

'We know they'll hurt us again,' Tenet testifies

BOB DROGIN, LOS ANGELES TIMES

WASHINGTON -- Top U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday that Osama bin Laden's terror network has been badly damaged around the world but still plans further attacks against the United States and its allies.

"We know they'll hurt us again," George Tenet, head of the CIA and the national intelligence community, told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in his first public appearance before Congress since Sept. 11.

Despite military victories in Afghanistan -- and the arrest of nearly 1,000 suspected al-Qaida operatives in more than 60 countries -- Tenet said bin Laden's network "has not yet been destroyed."

U.S. intelligence has confirmed the death of only two of al-Qaida's top 10 leaders in Afghanistan, and Tenet said those who escaped "are working to reconstitute the organization and to resume its terrorist operations."

Tenet said he does not know if bin Laden -- the focus of the most extensive and expensive manhunt in history -- is dead or alive. Bin Laden disappeared from U.S. surveillance in Afghanistan in early December.

The CIA director, flanked by intelligence chiefs from the Pentagon, the Justice Department and the State Department, provided the first public assessment since last fall of suspected terrorist plots and capabilities around the globe.

The security officials provided sobering new insights into the Bush administration's war on terror.

Al-Qaida cells, already in place, have plans to hit U.S. and allied targets in Europe, the Mideast, Southeast Asia and Africa, he said. U.S. diplomatic and military facilities are at "high risk," he added, especially in East Africa, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Turkey.

"Their modus operandi is to have multiple attack plans in the works simultaneously, and to have al-Qaida cells in place to conduct them," he said.

Tenet said the U.S.-led campaign to deny al-Qaida its safe haven, command center and training camps in Afghanistan had dealt "severe blows" to the group and its leaders.

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