Steve Quayle News Alerts

May 16, 2003

The al Qaeda terrorist network, its leadership severely weakened by 19 months of counterterrorism operations, is seeking to prove that it is still viable by launching more attacks on U.S. interests abroad to capitalize on Monday’s strikes in Saudi Arabia, intelligence and terrorism officials said yesterday.

SOME PLANS being detected by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies appear to have been in the works for months, if not longer, but are being brought to fruition quickly, they said.

“They would like to do them all at the same time and have the whole world go up,” one U.S. terrorism official said. “This is a very bad patch.”

U.S. counterterrorism experts are especially worried about the possibility of attacks against Americans and U.S. interests in Kenya and other parts of East Africa. Officials describe the volume of intelligence reports on potential threats there, including communications intercepts and tips from informants, as similar to the amount of information collected in Saudi Arabia before Monday’s attacks.

“In some cases, the bullets have already left the gun,” another intelligence official said.

Yesterday, the State Department issued a warning advising against travel to Kenya, and it has alerted Americans in recent days about possible terrorist attacks in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Intelligence officials and terrorism experts said Monday’s strikes in Saudi Arabia, which left 34 people dead, demonstrate al Qaeda’s patient adaptability and continued ability to coordinate multiple attacks. Monday’s assault was carried out in three locations by numerous armed men who coordinated their tactics to overwhelm and kill guards stationed at the entrances of the protected compounds.

POWER SHIFT
The attacks may also illustrate a shift in power within the beleaguered terrorist group. The terror cell that Saudi officials blame for the attack is headed by Khaled Jehani, who was previously viewed by U.S. officials as a low-level operative.

Last week, a self-described al Qaeda spokesman, Thabet bin Qais, told an Arabic-language publication in London that the network had reorganized and was planning another attack on the scale of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. The group is “way ahead of the Americans and its allies in the intelligence war, and American security agencies still are ignorant of the changes the leadership has made,” bin Qais said in an e-mail to Al Majalla magazine.

Despite the attacks in the capital city of Riyadh, U.S. officials maintain that al Qaeda has been hobbled. They repeated their view, however, that even a badly battered al Qaeda can mount deadly attacks and that other less organized groups and individuals — some only loosely affiliated with al Qaeda — will attempt strikes.

“The pressure that dozens and dozens and dozens of countries around the globe are putting on that terrorist network is having a good effect,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said yesterday. “We’ve always said that would not mean that there will not be terrorist attacks; we knew that and we’ve said that repeatedly.”

The interrogation of important captured al Qaeda figures, the elimination of Afghanistan as a base of operations and the aggressive, ongoing hunt for other al Qaeda operatives have made large-scale attacks like the strikes on the World Trade Center and Pentagon much less likely, many officials believe.

Dale Watson, former FBI counterterrorism chief, said, “I don’t see this as a big re-establishment of al Qaeda. They are getting down to fourth-tier players.

“Them being a viable, credible threat to pull off simultaneous attacks in the United States — I don’t see that. That doesn’t mean . . . they couldn’t shoot people up on the Mall. But so could . . . neo-Nazi groups.

“Training camps have been taken out of Afghanistan. They will never have another area like that where they can train,” he added. ”[Osama] bin Laden can’t have meetings. They are on the run, there is no doubt about that.”

Authorities noted that improved intelligence and added manpower foiled a string of other plots. Authorities announced earlier this month that they had broken up an al Qaeda plan to fly an explosives-laden aircraft into the U.S. consulate in Karachi, Pakistan.

Nevertheless, terrorism officials and experts say al Qaeda is still operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, Pakistan, Yemen, Chechnya and Egypt. The terror network has made frequent use of plastic explosives, and it may still have active smuggling routes to Saudi Arabia through Lebanon. Watson said it would be difficult to police Saudi Arabia’s vast borders sufficiently to prevent the illicit flow of small quantities of explosives.

‘The pressure that dozens and dozens and dozens of countries around the globe are putting on that terrorist network is having a good effect.’— DEFENSE SECRETARY DONALD H. RUMSFELD

Pasquale “Pat” D’Amuro, the FBI’s chief of counterterrorism and counterintelligence, told the House Judiciary Committee last week that “while al Qaeda may very well be in disarray, I believe it still has the capability to attack our interests. I still want to emphasize that it is a severe threat to this nation.”

MONEY STILL FLOWING
Terrorism experts said stemming the flow of money to al Qaeda is perhaps the most frustrating of all the fronts in the war on terrorism because of the inherent difficulty of preventing the transfer of funds around the world via underground routes.

While U.S. Treasury officials point out they and U.S. allies have frozen $134 million in suspected terrorist funds in the last two years, that is only a tiny fraction of the sums to which al Qaeda has access, terrorism experts said. In any case, it cost al Qaeda only $500,000 to carry out the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the Rand Corp.

“We’ve always been of the opinion that they’re still globally capable and ready and available to carry out attacks,” said James K. Kallstrom, a former FBI assistant director who now serves as New York’s homeland security chief. “They’ve been diminished to some extent, no question about it. But this bombing just confirms that they’re still active and they still have reach.”

One senior U.S. counterterrorism official said authorities remain deeply concerned about the whereabouts and intentions of trainees who attended al Qaeda paramilitary camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s.

The alleged leader of the cell blamed for the Riyadh bombing underwent al Qaeda training and left behind a suicide “martyrdom” videotape in Afghanistan, officials noted.

“Thousands of people went through those camps, and it only takes a handful willing to blow themselves up,” one official said. “We’ve taken out a number of foot soldiers and mid- to high-level operators and managers, but they are still capable of launching something.”

One expert noted that the relatively rudimentary car bombs used in Monday’s attacks are particularly difficult to police.

“It’s shades of Lebanon and Khobar Towers,” said Ruth Wedgwood, a former terrorism prosecutor who teaches law at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington. “It’s hard to make anything truly invulnerable to something as primitive as a car bomb.”

http://www.msnbc.com/news/913744.asp?0cv=CA00