Al-Qaida still a threat to America

WASHINGTON — Al-Qaida and its loose network of terrorist groups continue to plot attacks inside the United States and to threaten countries around the globe, top U.S. intelligence officials said Wednesday in a sobering annual outlook on the nation's security.

"Al-Qaida is intent on finding ways to circumvent U.S. security enhancements to strike Americans and the homeland," CIA director Porter Goss told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

He added that "it may be only a matter of time before al-Qaida or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons" here or abroad.

Goss also said that the war in Iraq has become a cause for Islamic extremists who are exploiting it to recruit anti-U.S. "jihadists." He warned that those who survive will emerge from Iraq as experienced urban fighters who could be a threat elsewhere.

FBI director Robert Mueller told the senators that despite U.S. success in disrupting al-Qaida's organization after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, terrorists remain the gravest threat to the country.

Mueller said the FBI's top concerns are covert operatives who may now be in the United States planning an attack, a growing number of reports that al-Qaida is seeking weapons of mass destruction, and the possibility that terrorists will recruit "radical American converts."

The FBI director said that in the past year his agency has identified extremists throughout the United States and begun monitoring their activities.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, testifying at the same time to the House Armed Services Committee, also warned of "troubling" evidence of terrorists' desire to acquire non-conventional weaponry.

"We can reasonably predict" that future foes might use cyberattack or weapons of mass destruction, he said.

Goss told the Senate panel that nuclear weapons appear to be increasingly accessible to non-state organizations and to anti-American nations.

The CIA chief said that Russia's stockpiles of nuclear weapons from the Cold War era remain vulnerable to theft. "I can't account for some of the material," he told the senators.

He also said he could not rule out the possibility that terrorist groups could be getting nuclear weapons through the network of A.Q. Khan, a Pakistani scientist who is under house arrest for selling his weapons expertise abroad.

Goss said that his agency is still exploring how far the Khan nuclear black market reached.