US Intelligence Officials Warn of Persistent Threat from al-Qaida

US Intelligence Officials Warn of Persistent Threat from al-Qaida: "America's top intelligence officials have delivered a sobering assessment to Congress, saying that the al-Qaida terrorist network remains a persistent threat to the United States because its followers have been able to adapt their methods to make detection difficult.

National Intelligence Director Dennis Blair testified Wednesday to the House of Representatives' Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, that the threat from al-Qaida remains strong.

'We have been warning in the past several years that al-Qaida itself, and its affiliates and al-Qaida-inspired terrorists remain committed to striking the United States. And in the past year, we have some names that go behind these warnings,' he said.

Blair named as examples from the past year Najibullah Zazi, an Afghan-born man charged with plotting to use weapons of mass destruction in the United States and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, a Nigerian man who allegedly tried to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner on Christmas Day.

Blair also cited Major Nidal Hasan, an American who allegedly shot and killed 13 people at Fort Hood, in Texas, as an example of a 'homegrown, self-radicalized extremist.'

Blair warned that the threat of violent extremism is constantly evolving.

'We have made complex, multi-team attacks very difficult for al-Qaida to pull off,' he said. 'But as we saw with the recent rash of attacks last year, both successful and unsuccessful, identifying individual terrorists, small groups with short histories, using simple attack methods, is a much more difficult task,' said Blair.

At a similar hearing held by the Senate Select Intelligence Committee on Tuesday, Central Intelligence Agency Director Leon Panetta said that it is not so much that the United States faces an attack like the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack.

'I think the greater threat is that al-Qaida is adapting their methods in ways that often times make it difficult to detect,' he said."



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