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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: PROLIFE who wrote (565258)	4/15/2004 10:41:16 PM
From: tejek	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Thanks, Mr. Bush! ******************************************************** Published Friday April 16, 2004 Al-Qaida still potent and far from alone WASHINGTON (AP) - The 9/11 commission has explored how terrorists have evolved since the attacks, finding that today's terrorist lacks the command structure of al-Qaida in its heyday but remains agile and able to attack with a variety of lethal means. Federal officials said diverse organizations inspired and in some cases aided by al-Qaida are plotting attacks. Such groups are operating largely on their own while sharing technology of mass death. Officials have made clear that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, despite the loss of some of its high-ranking members, is not a spent force. "Catastrophic attacks on the scale of September 11 remain within al-Qaida's reach," CIA Director George Tenet told the commission. U.S. intelligence services are focusing on the Summer Olympics in Greece as a prime terrorist target, along with the presidential nominating conventions this summer in Boston and New York. In commission hearings, government witnesses described an array of like-minded groups that can hatch their own plots and reach beyond their own territory. Another tier consists of smaller organizations abroad devoted to local mayhem that may target U.S. interests. "These far-flung groups increasingly set the agenda and are redefining the threat we face," Tenet said. "They are not all creatures of bin Laden, and so their fate is not tied to his. They have autonomous leadership, they pick their own targets, and they plan their own attacks." The commission's next public hearings will be in mid-May. It will hear privately from President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, although the date has not been disclosed. In testimony, commissioners were told of: • 100,000 names and aliases in a worldwide terrorist database. • Intelligence suggesting that more than 100 al-Qaida-trained extremists are in Europe. • A heightened risk of poison attacks, coupled with the danger that groups other than al-Qaida will find sophisticated ways to deliver such a weapon. • The dissemination among terrorist groups of assembly instructions for a chemical weapon using common materials that could cause mass casualties in a crowded area. • Terrorist documents containing accurate information on how a radiological dirty bomb might be used. The U.S. government has identified a variety of Sunni extremist groups as beneficiaries of links to al-Qaida. Among them: the al-Zarqawi network, Ansar al-Islam in Iraq and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. omaha.com