WASHINGTON — Al-Qaeda, increasingly tamped down in Iraq, is establishing cells in other countries as Osama bin Laden’s organization uses Pakistan’s tribal region to train for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the United States, the U.S. intelligence chief said Tuesday.
“Al-Qaeda remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States,” Mike McConnell said at a Senate hearing more than six years after the Sept. 11 attacks.
McConnell said that fewer than 100 al-Qaeda terrorists have moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries as the U.S. military clamps down on their activities, and the organization “may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country.”
McConnell said that while the level of violence in Iraq has dropped sharply since last year, it is going to be years before Iraq is stable. “It is not going to be over in a year. It’s going to be a long time to bring it to closure,” he said.
The al-Qaeda network in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan has suffered setbacks, but he said the group poses a persistent and growing danger.
The Pakistani tribal areas provide al-Qaeda a haven similar to what it enjoyed in Afghanistan before the war, but on a smaller and less secure scale, McConnell told the Senate Intelligence Committee. It uses the area to “maintain a cadre of skilled lieutenants capable of directing the organization’s operations around the world,” he said.
The next attack on the United States will most likely be launched by al-Qaeda operating in those “under-governed regions” of Pakistan, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to tell Congress today.
“Continued congressional support for the legitimate government of Pakistan braces this bulwark in the long war against violent extremism,” Mullen stated in remarks prepared for a separate budget hearing and obtained by The Associated Press.
FBI Director Robert Mueller, who testified alongside McConnell, said al-Qaeda continues to present a “critical threat to the homeland” and warned that “homegrown terrorists” inspired by al-Qaeda’s propaganda on the Internet posed a threat as well.
Praise for Pakistan as partner
U.S. intelligence agencies believe al-Qaeda figures who fled Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001 have regrouped inside Pakistan’s tribal region, posing a threat to U.S. forces across the border and offering a potential base for global operations. U.S. officials have said they believe bin Laden is hiding there.
Still, McConnell lauded Pakistan’s cooperation, saying that more than 1,300 Pakistanis died fighting terrorists or in terrorist attacks in 2007. He said Islamabad has done more to “neutralize” terrorists than any other partner of the United States.
Despite the cooperation, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said, the Pakistani military has been unable to disrupt or damage al-Qaeda terrorists operating in the tribal border region. And the U.S. military is prohibited by Pakistan from pursuing Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters who cross the border to conduct attacks inside Afghanistan.
McConnell also told the committee that the Taliban, once thought to be routed from Afghanistan, has expanded its operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around the capital of Kabul, despite the death or capture of three top commanders in the last year.
CIA view on waterboarding
At the same hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaeda terrorists who were subjected to a harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.
“We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time,” Hayden said. “There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were imminent. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaeda and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”
Hayden said that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — the purported mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States — and Abu Zubayda and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri were subject to the harsh interrogations in 2002 and 2003. Waterboarding is an interrogation technique that critics call torture.
Waterboarding induces a feeling of imminent drowning. The subject is restrained with mouth covered and water poured over the face.
“Waterboarding taken to its extreme could be death. You could drown someone,” McConnell acknowledged. He said waterboarding remains a technique in the CIA’s arsenal but would require the consent of the president and legal approval of the attorney general.
