Cheney predicts new terror attack
From the BBC in London
news.bbc.co.uk
Officials say attacks could match 11 September
US Vice President Dick Cheney has said it is
"almost certain" al-Qaeda will carry out
another terror attack on America.
He said it was "not a
matter of if, but when"
the militants blamed for
11 September would
strike again.
US security sources
have indicated that
al-Qaeda may be planning new attacks, and
that these might involve planting bombs in
apartment buildings.
Mr Cheney also defended the Bush
administration's handling of reports on
al-Qaeda activity prior to the September
attacks, while acknowledging that intelligence
agencies had failed to pool their information.
"We don't know if it's
going to be tomorrow
or next week or next
year," said the vice
president, adding that
the US had had "some
success" in disrupting
al-Qaeda's network.
The militants, led by
Osama Bin Laden, are
believed to have
organised the suicide
attacks on 11
September, which
killed about 3,000 people in New York,
Washington, and Pennsylvania.
US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice
said on Sunday that the US was on a far
higher state of terror alert now than it was
before those attacks.
'Chatter in the system'
Intelligence specialists have said there has
been an increase in the volume of messages
between al-Qaeda cells, similar to that noted
before 11 September.
An FBI spokeswoman, Debbie Weierman, said
members of the network had reportedly been
"considering renting apartments in unspecified
areas of the United States and then planting
explosives".
A senior Bush
administration official
quoted by the New
York Times suggested
that the new
intelligence reports
had yet to form a
coherent picture.
"There's just a lot of
chatter in the system
again," the official
said.
But a recent suicide
bombing in Karachi, Pakistan, and an attack on
a synagogue in Tunisia are seen as evidence
by US intelligence officials that al-Qaeda still
has the potential to stage deadly attacks.
Bush under fire
The Bush administration has defended its
failure to foresee the 11 September attacks,
saying the information was too vague to
indicate the hijackers' precise plan.
"I still have a deep sense of anger that anyone
would suggest that the president of the United
States had advance knowledge that he failed
to act on," said Mr Cheney on Sunday.
There was nothing, he
said, in a CIA report last
August warning of
possible hijackings, that
was specific enough for
pre-emptive action to
be taken.
But he accepted that
there had been a failure
on the part of the
intelligence agencies to
coordinate their anti-terrorist activities - an
institutional failure, he argued, which was not
the fault of President Bush.
In recent days, it has emerged that several
memos and reports had been passed on to
officials which pointed to a planned attack.
President Bush spoke out on Friday, saying he
would have done everything in his power to
stop the attacks if he had known in advance.
But critics have demanded an inquiry into the
intelligence failure and senior Democrats
accuse the Republican administration of trying
to stifle legitimate debate. |
