Al-Qaeda's Gains Keep U.S. at Risk, Report Says

Bin Laden's ability to establish a safe haven for training and planning has been uppermost in the minds of intelligence and counterterrorism officials since the late 1990s. Missile strikes authorized in 1998 by President Bill Clinton against al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan appeared to have little effect on bin Laden's operations. In the summer of 2001, President Bush received an intelligence warning titled "Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in the U.S.," but the Sept. 11 attacks occurred before action was taken.

Since then, various administration officials have hailed the success of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. In February 2003, then-CIA Director George Tenet told Congress that "more than one-third of the top al-Qaeda leadership identified before the [Afghanistan] war has been killed or captured." Three months later, Bush increased that number to "about half" in a speech he gave in May, amid early concerns that the two-month-old Iraq war had diverted administration attention from the hunt for bin Laden. "Al-Qaeda is on the run," Bush said.

In early 2004, as the Pakistani offensive was bolstered by U.S. and Afghan forces on the other side of the border, Tenet described al-Qaeda's leadership as "seriously damaged" and noted that it had continued to lose "operational safe havens." The next year, Vice Adm. Lowell E. Jacoby, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency at the time, told Congress that after those operations, "the fundamentalist Islamic terrorist threat has splintered and decentralized."

Those previous judgments were "basically correct at the time," said Thomas Fingar, head of the National Intelligence Council, which assembles NIEs for the 16-agency intelligence community. "All of this has a high level of uncertainty to it, but the situation had changed," he added. Fingar said that one lesson learned from the past, when analysts just repeated and built upon earlier assessments -- as with the faulty judgments of Saddam Hussein's weapons capabilities -- is that previous NIEs are no longer "sacred text."

Fingar said the intelligence community is not stepping back from its past judgment that as much as three-quarters of the pre-Sept. 11 al-Qaeda leadership was killed or captured. "The obvious word is 'reconstitution,' " he said.

Although the NIE described al-Qaeda in Iraq as the only al-Qaeda affiliate "known to have expressed a desire to attack the Homeland," administration and intelligence officials yesterday cited only one such reference to that threat -- an audio statement posted in November on the Web site of a British-based Saudi dissident group. In the statement, Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader, threatened to "blow up the filthiest house, which is called the White House."

The Bush administration has long described al-Qaeda in Iraq as an operational subsidiary to the main al-Qaeda group, though intelligence officials have said the main al-Qaeda organization exercises little control over the Iraq group. Yesterday's NIE suggested that al-Qaeda derives stature from al-Qaeda in Iraq's activities, rather than the other way around.

Staff writer Robin Wright and research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.