Originally Posted by LilStarZ07
whata re you even talking about, 5 people? huh? im talking about harlem to the bronx ... he was the one i was speaking to and he understood what i was saying and took it like should have .........................
say what you will about how "safe" we are but the only fact you and i both know is that there hasnt been another attack since 9/11 ... thats the only thing im sure of ...
Instability in the Middle East which we have not fixed. Threatens every country in that region which in turn affects us.... Let me remind you thatin 05 Britain had several terror attacks
[h1]Post-9/11, 'we are not safe'[/h1]
By
Josh Meyer
September 11, 2007 in print edition A-4
Six years after the deadliest terrorist attacks on American soil, the United States is in many ways unprepared to stop another major strike against the homeland, which Al Qaeda appears intent on carrying out in the near future, four of the nation's top counter- terrorism officials told a Senate panel Monday.
Al Qaeda's intentions have been underscored in recent days by the disruption of suspected terrorist plots in Germany and Denmark, the first propaganda video by
Osama bin Laden in three years, and persistent intelligence showing that Al Qaeda has regrouped in a Pakistan haven and is training operatives there for attacks worldwide.
Al Qaeda's media arm said Monday that it was preparing to release a second Bin Laden tape. He is expected to again taunt President Bush and other pursuers, and praise those responsible for the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
"Our counter-terrorism efforts have disrupted some of the enemy's plans and diminished certain capabilities," John Scott Redd, the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Center, told the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. "But the events of the last days and the last weeks clearly demonstrate the clear and present danger which continues to exist."
In more than three hours of prepared testimony and questioning, Homeland Security Secretary
Michael Chertoff, Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and Redd said significant progress had been made in deterring another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
McConnell said counter- terrorism intelligence-gathering was much improved, in part due to expanded post-Sept. 11 electronic surveillance powers, including those under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Confirming a Times report, McConnell told the committee that U.S. electronic intercepts helped in last week's thwarting of an alleged terrorist plot in Germany involving militants trained in camps run by Al Qaeda-affiliated Islamic Jihad Union.
The surveillance "allowed us to see and understand all the connections" to Al Qaeda, McConnell said. "Because we could understand it, we could help our partners through a long process of monitoring and observation, realizing that the perpetrators had actually obtained explosive liquids."
After the hearing, Redd confirmed that U.S. intercepts played a central role in disrupting a suspected "major" plot in Denmark. Eight alleged Al Qaeda affiliates were arrested.
McConnell said that at least some of the intercepts in the German plot were made possible by a "temporary fix" to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, in which Congress tried last month to maintain the surveillance system while addressing some legal issues. After the hearing, McConnell appeared to clarify his remarks in an interview with reporters, saying FISA was used in the German case even before the law was changed.
During the hearing, McConnell said he thought the act itself was in jeopardy due to concerns that intelligence officials were "spying on Americans, doing data-mining and so on," which he said was "simply not true."
"If we lose FISA, we will lose, in my estimate, 50% of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists - what they're doing to train, what they're doing to recruit and what they're doing to try to get into this country," he said.
Redd testified of other successes over the last six years, saying authorities had taken thousands of terrorists off streets and battlefields and disrupted dozens of plots.
"All of this means to me that we are safer today than we were on September the 11th, 2001," said Redd, a retired Navy vice admiral, like McConnell. "But we are not safe, and nor are we likely to be for a generation or more. We're in a long war; we face an enemy that is adaptable, dangerous and persistent."
The officials described their fears about how Al Qaeda, its affiliates and terrorists from Europe and perhaps the U.S. were exploiting gaps in the safety net. They cited the recent National Intelligence Estimate, which said Al Qaeda continued to focus on "prominent political, economic and infrastructure targets with the goal of producing mass casualties, visually dramatic destruction, significant economic aftershocks, and/or fear in the U.S. population."
All four of the witnesses conceded under questioning that weaknesses remained despite the billions spent on counter-terrorism and domestic security.
McConnell said "significant cultural issues" still hindered the information-sharing necessary to stop an attack. And the various intelligence agencies "still have some distance to go" in hiring and training analysts and case officers who speak key foreign languages such as Arabic and Urdu, he said.
Some senators were far more critical than their witnesses.
Sen. Jon Tester (D-Mont.) said a failure to track individuals who overstayed their visas was "particularly shocking and troubling to me." He also said there were "huge gaps" in the security of the nation's food supply.
Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.) said the nation urgently needed a national ID card program so that potential terrorists would not be able to use forged or fake identification. The counter- terrorism officials agreed.
Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) said: "We are safer, but there are still gaping holes.
"There are still major problems, whether it's communication, whether it's technology, whether it's the struggle for ideas that we seem to be failing at around the world, whether it's our image in the moderate Muslim world and how that is undermining the ultimate struggle we have - which is the radicalism that we find in some parts of the Muslim world."
[h2]Seven years after 9/11, Al-Qaeda leaders plot on in safe havens[/h2] [h5]
Thursday, September 11, 2008[/h5]
WASHINGTON - Agence France-Presse
Seven years after the deadliest attack on the United States, al-Qaeda's masterminds remain beyond U.S. reach, stirring violence and plotting new attacks on the West, officials and analysts said.
As the U.S. prepared to mark seventh anniversary of 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, from sanctuaries in nuclear-armed Pakistan, Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri are presiding over an al-Qaeda that has sprung back from serious setbacks with help from its old friends, the Taliban, they added.
They are "not only still at large, but actively communicating with their followers around the world by video messages, and actively engaged in supporting two wars against American forces -- in Afghanistan and Iraq," said Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer.
With political turmoil in Pakistan and a revived Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, al-Qaeda is in the thick of things once again despite shattering losses in Iraq and Saudi Arabia.
"Today, if violent extremism and terrorism have a center, it is Pakistan and not Iraq," said Anthony Cordesman, an analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
U.S. intelligence worries that al-Qaeda is using its Pakistani safe havens to prepare for attacks on the West.
It now enjoys many of the operational and organizational advantages there that it had in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, said Ted Gistaro, the U.S. government's top intelligence analyst for transnational threats.
"In spite of successful U.S. and allied operations against al-Qaeda, especially the death of important al-Qaeda figures since December, the group has maintained or strengthened key elements of its capability to attack the United States in the past year," he told a Washington think tank last month.
It has replenished its cadre of skilled operatives, and "is identifying, training, and positioning operatives for attacks in the West, likely including the United States," he said.
Intensifying operations:
That may explain, in part, the intensifying U.S. operations in the tribal areas, which have included stepped up missile attacks and a reported cross border raid this week by U.S. commandos in South Waziristan.
Gistaro said he was not aware of any "specific, credible" plot to attack the United States. But, he said, "As the (November) election nears, we expect to see an up tick in such threat reporting -- of varying credibility -- regarding possible attacks."
Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University, notes that al-Qaeda has made major attention-getting moves before U.S. elections, striking the USS Cole in October 2000 and airing a video tape of Osama bin Laden before the 2004 vote.
Most famously, the Madrid bombings in March 2004 three days before general elections prompted the defeat of the ruling party and Spain's withdrawal of troops from Iraq.
"I'm also hearing from people in the Pentagon that, yes, there is a 'We've only got four more months on Bush's watch, and we're going to find ourselves in a position where the perpetrator of the greatest mass murder in American history has outlived the president on whose watch it happened," said Riedel.
"I'm sure they're getting a lot of pressure to do something about that," he said.
But Riedel, author of the recently published "The Search for Al-Qaeda: Its Leadership, Ideology and Future," said the threat cannot be eliminated without shutting down the Pakistani safe havens.
"Commando raids, Predator attacks may get you, if you have extraordinarily good intelligence and luck, high value targets like bin Laden," he said.
"But they can't really eliminate the sanctuary itself, which can only be eliminated by Pakistanis doing it in cooperation with us or on their own," he said.
"The trick of this is to get the Pakistanis to do more. And to the extent that we come into a more hostile relationship with Pakistan by violating their sovereignty, chances are that that kind of cooperation will diminish.
"So we are in a very difficult situation here."
How did it get so bad?
Many analysts believe that the U.S. invasion of Iraq diverted intelligence assets, resources and high level attention from Afghanistan at a time when al-Qaeda was at its most vulnerable.
"The short answer to that is they took the eye off the ball," Riedel said.
