Report: Al-Qaida eyes Iraq ties for U.S. attack

Bush downplays report
The White House sought to downplay the report’s worries about the future of international counterterrorism cooperation. Bush’s homeland security adviser, Frances Fragos Townsend, said the administration isn’t concerned about being abandoned by allies. Cooperation is “actually as strong as it’s ever been,” she said.

The Bush administration also brushed off critics who say the administration released the intelligence estimate now to help its case as the Senate debates whether to withdraw troops from Iraq. White House press secretary Tony Snow said critics are “engaged in a little selective hearing ... to shape the story in their own political ways.”

Meanwhile, Democrats said the report was proof that U.S. anti-terrorism efforts are being drained by the Iraq war.

House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, D-Mo., called on the U.S. to “responsibly redeploy” its troops from Iraq and turn security over to the Iraqis. “In hindsight, we should have concentrated our efforts on al-Qaida in Afghanistan from the beginning,” he said.

Significant debate in recent weeks has focused on the genesis of the al-Qaida threat in Iraq and the nature of its links to al-Qaida’s leaders. With the intelligence report’s release, Bush sought to draw the threat in Iraq closer to bin Laden. “These people have sworn allegiance to the very same man who ordered the attack on September the 11th, 2001,” he said.

Other threats
At a briefing and in a later interview, Ted Gistaro, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats, said al-Qaida in Iraq did not have any active cells when the U.S. invaded in March 2003. He said the watershed moment was when its now-deceased leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, declared his allegiance to bin Laden in an October 2004 Internet message.

Beyond al-Qaida, the report also laid out three other potential terror threats to the country:

• Lebanese Hezbollah, a Shiite Muslim extremist group, may be more likely to consider attacking here, especially if it believes the United States is directly threatening the group or its main sponsor, Iran.
  
• The number of homegrown extremists in the U.S. and its Western allies is growing, fueled by Internet web sites and anti-American rhetoric.
  
• So-called “single issue” terrorist groups probably will attack here on a smaller scale. They include white supremacists, anarchists and animal rights groups, such as Animal Liberation Front.

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