Cheney: More Attacks 'Almost A Certainty'

May 19, 2002

"I think that the prospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost a certainty."
U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney confirmed Sunday that U.S. intelligence indicates al Qaeda is trying to regroup and carry out more attacks on U.S. targets.

"I think that the prospects of a future attack on the U.S. are almost a certainty," Cheney told "Fox News Sunday." "It could happen tomorrow, it could happen next week, it could happen next year, but they will keep trying. And we have to be prepared."

Asked if Osama bin-Laden's network was planning to strike American targets, Cheney said: "We assume they are. There is certainly a level of noise out there in the system that would indicate that those efforts are continuing."

The suggestion is that the network is reconstituting itself after a winter of disruptions caused by the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and widespread arrests across the globe.

"There's a great temptation ... for people to look back at September 11 and say, `Well, we haven't been hit in eight months, therefore the threats have ceded or gone away.' I don't think that's the case at all," Cheney said.

On Sunday, The New York Times quoted intelligence officials who have intercepted a troubling series of communications among al Qaeda operatives over the last few months. Although the information is vague, it indicates that Osama bin Laden’s terrorist organization is trying to carry out an operation as big as the Sept. 11 attacks or bigger.

But just as last summer's threats left counter-terrorism analysts guessing about al Qaeda's intentions, and believing that the attack might be carried out overseas, the new interceptions are so general that they have left President Bush and his counter-terrorism team in the dark about the time, place or method of what some officials refer to as a second-wave attack, the Times says. As a result, the government is essentially limited to taking broad defensive measures.

The officials the Times spoke with compared the intercepted messages, which they described as cryptic and ambiguous, with the pattern of those picked up last spring and early summer, when Al Qaeda operatives were also overheard talking about a big operation.

"It's again not specific — not specific as to time, not specific as to place," one senior administration official is quoted by the Times as saying.

In a related development, the White House - which had objected to a congressional investigation of the administration's handling of warnings before the Sept. 11 attacks - now says a probe could be legitimate, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller, but only if it is conducted in a non-partisan manner and isn’t designed to give Democrats a political advantage.

The White House doesn't want "a fishing expedition" that becomes, in spokesman Ari Fleischer's words, "an endless waste of taxpayer money in an open-ended congressional investigation," Knoller says.

The position is in contrast to criticism by President Bush and other administration officials in recent days that Democratic questioning of the White House’s treatment of the intelligence was inappropriate in a time of war.

Democrats have been suggesting an expansion of inquiries into what the White House and federal law enforcement officials knew about possible attacks and when they knew it.

Fleischer had said Friday, “I think that any time anybody suggests or implies to the American people that this president had specific information that could have prevented the attacks on our country on September 11, that crosses the lines.”

But House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt of Missouri said, "Our nation is not well served when the charges of `partisan politics' is leveled at those who simply seek information that the American people need and deserve to know."

Democrats insisted their motive was simply to help avoid Sept. 11-like attacks in the future.
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