At a campaign rally Saturday in his Illinois district with Vice President Dick Cheney, Hastert said al Qaeda "would like to influence this election" with an attack similar to the train bombings in Madrid days before the Spanish national election in March.

When a reporter asked Hastert if he thought al Qaeda would operate with more comfort if Kerry were elected, the speaker said, "That's my opinion, yes."

Al-Qaida supporters suggested in a Web site message this week they would welcome a pre-election terror attack on the U.S. as a way to usher in a McCain presidency.

The message, posted Monday on the password-protected al-Hesbah Web site, said if al-Qaida wants to exhaust the United States militarily and economically, "impetuous" Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain is the better choice because he is more likely to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"This requires presence of an impetuous American leader such as McCain, who pledged to continue the war till the last American soldier," the message said. "Then, al-Qaida will have to support McCain in the coming elections so that he continues the failing march of his predecessor, Bush."

SITE Intelligence Group, based in Bethesda, Md., monitors the Web site and translated the message.

"If al-Qaida carries out a big operation against American interests," the message said, "this act will be support of McCain because it will push the Americans deliberately to vote for McCain so that he takes revenge for them against al-Qaida. Al-Qaida then will succeed in exhausting America till its last year in it."

Labels: 2008 election, al-Qaeda, John McCain

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

The new plan, outlined in a highly classified Pentagon order, was intended to eliminate some of those battles. And it was meant to pave a smoother path into the tribal areas for American commandos, who for years have bristled at what they see as Washington’s risk-averse attitude toward Special Operations missions inside Pakistan. They also argue that catching Mr. bin Laden will come only by capturing some of his senior lieutenants alive.

But more than six months later, the Special Operations forces are still waiting for the green light. The plan has been held up in Washington by the very disagreements it was meant to eliminate. A senior Defense Department official said there was “mounting frustration” in the Pentagon at the continued delay.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush committed the nation to a “war on terrorism” and made the destruction of Mr. bin Laden’s network the top priority of his presidency. But it is increasingly clear that the Bush administration will leave office with Al Qaeda having successfully relocated its base from Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it has rebuilt much of its ability to attack from the region and broadcast its messages to militants across the world.

A recent American airstrike killing Pakistani troops has only inflamed tensions along the mountain border and added to tensions between Washington and Pakistan’s new government.

The story of how Al Qaeda, whose name is Arabic for “the base,” has gained a new haven is in part a story of American accommodation to President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan, whose advisers played down the terrorist threat. It is also a story of how the White House shifted its sights, beginning in 2002, from counterterrorism efforts in Afghanistan and Pakistan to preparations for the war in Iraq.

Just as it had on the day before 9/11, Al Qaeda now has a band of terrorist camps from which to plan and train for attacks against Western targets, including the United States. Officials say the new camps are smaller than the ones the group used prior to 2001. However, despite dozens of American missile strikes in Pakistan since 2002, one retired C.I.A. officer estimated that the makeshift training compounds now have as many as 2,000 local and foreign militants, up from several hundred three years ago.

Labels: al-Qaeda, terrorism

Picture this: A terrifying new report is delivered to the U.S. President. It states starkly that al-Qaeda is in the last stages of preparing to attack the United States. But the response is…nothing. The President takes no action, and the report goes basically unreported in the media.

We’ve heard this story before. But this is not the infamous August, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” This happened just over a week ago, when the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) issued a scathing report about the mounting danger of a reconstituted al-Qaeda growing and plotting in the tribal sections of Pakistan. The President’s reaction now, as it was in 2001, was silence.

According to the report, “al-Qaeda’s central leadership, based in the border area of Pakistan, is and will remain the most serious terrorist threat to the United States…” In 2002, after the al-Qaeda-supported Taliban was forced from power in neighboring Afghanistan, al-Qaeda members and their Afghan extremist allies fled across the border into the mountains of northwest Pakistan, known as the “Federally Administered Tribal Areas” (FATA).

The FATA is desperately poor, undereducated and underdeveloped, with a per-capita income of less than seventy cents per day, half the Pakistani national average. It was in this region—where millions of Afghan refugees fled during the Afghan civil and anti-Soviet wars of the 1980s and 1990s—that the Taliban built the backbone of its army: recruiting, indoctrinating and training a generation of “holy warriors” in radical madrassas. The region’s literacy rate is 17%, leaving a massive educational void to be filled by extremist education. There are about 300 religious madrassas registered in the FATA and potentially hundreds more unregistered Islamic schools. Evidence indicates these schools foster public support for Islamist extremism and terrorism. The Taliban succeeded by taking young refugees who looked forward to no schooling, no jobs and no path in the world, and giving them a religious education, a position in an army and both a spiritual and social purpose.

al-Qaeda and the Taliban have built a new, safe home in the FATA from which they can train and prepare to launch more terrorist attacks across the world. This GAO report demonstrates clearly that they are succeeding in this endeavor, in part because the White House has failed to plan adequately, and act effectively, to defeat our primary enemy.

I suspect that U.S. domestic politics is the primary reason the White House has all but ignored this report, at least in public. Ironically, while the administration has failed to seriously confront this problem, the Republican Party has repeatedly won the presidency and lower elections by banking on its macho image and playing the tough guy, portraying their Democratic opponents as effeminate wimps. (Their campaign has already begun to use the same smear campaign on Barack Obama, pitting him against John McCain and his prisoner of war record.) This Republican machismo translates into a governance love affair with massive, explosive weapons systems like National Missile Defense. It means belittling most international policies designed to support development (economic, political and social) in the underdeveloped regions of the world where terrorism is most easily born. It means investing in large-scale military resources (useful to fight the Nazis or the Soviets) at the expense of “soft-power” tools proven more effective at defeating terrorist groups.

The vast majority of conservative, liberal and moderate national security experts—including General David Petraeus and other counterinsurgency gurus now gaining prominence in the U.S. military—recognize that we can only close these safe havens and defeat al-Qaeda through mostly non-military means. But as the GAO report states, that current U.S. policy directs literally 99% of all funding for Pakistan's FATA toward military and security efforts, and less than 1% for development. Defeating al-Qaeda will require something more than a 1% solution.

This macho image plays well into the President’s Iraq policy as he and his supporters brandish phrases such as, “Bring it on” to challenge insurgents, and label their Iraq policy critics as cowardly “surrender monkeys.” Again, while this is politically advantageous for their own constituencies at home, it has locked the President and his would-be-successor John McCain into a fixation on Iraq when the real threat to the U.S. is in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Labels: 2008 election, al-Qaeda, icepick meet forehead, Pakistan

The U.S. military said Wednesday that two women used as suicide bombers in attacks earlier this month had undergone psychiatric treatment but there is no indication they had Down syndrome as Iraqi and U.S. officials initially had claimed.

Rear Adm. Gregory Smith, a military spokesman, said the women used in the Feb. 1 pet market bombings had been identified as residents from the northeastern outskirts of Baghdad who were in their late 20s or early 30s.

The two attacks killed nearly 100 people, and Iraqi and U.S. officials said at the time the women appeared to be unwitting attackers.

Lt. Gen. Abboud Qanbar, the chief Iraqi military commander in Baghdad, said soon after the attacks that photos of the women's heads showed they had Down syndrome, but he did not offer any other proof.

A U.S. military spokesman for the Baghdad area, Lt. Col. Steve Stover, also said at the time that medical experts with his division had examined the photos and agreed the women probably suffered from the genetic disorder. "They were both females and they both looked like they had Down syndrome," Stover said on Feb. 2.

A cell phone image of one of the heads viewed by The Associated Press was inconclusive.

There was speculation that the heads could have been distorted by the blast, leading police initially to believe they had Down syndrome.

On Wednesday, Smith backed away from the claim about Down syndrome while responding to a question concerning the psychiatric histories of the two bombers.

"Both had recently received psychiatric treatment for depression and/or schizophrenia. From what we know now there's no indication that they had Down syndrome," Smith said, citing records obtained by the military.

Labels: al-Qaeda, Bush Administration, utter horseshit

When al-Qaida’s media arm released its first Osama Bin Laden video in nearly three years, most of the media attention was focused on Bin Laden's beard. It appeared either dyed — or perhaps even pasted on. He was ridiculed and a variety of theories were offered to explain it.

But now, there is a running debate among video analysts about whether al-Qaida faked the video altogether —that rather than being new, the September 7 message may have been something recorded at the same time as his last video in October 2004 (and then released with new audio).

The point of departure for the debate is something not noted at the time: that of the 25 minutes of video tape, only three and a half minutes, were moving video. The rest was covered by a still image or a frozen still. Moreover, the still covered the only time references on the 25 minute of tape— references to political developments in Iraq, Britain and France. This lead to the suspicion that the video is not new, but disguised to appear as new.

A senior U.S. intelligence official says they believe the message is authentic, adding “it remains our view that the September 7 Bin Laden video is, in fact, new… interesting but not compelling.”

The leading proponent of the theory is a computer scientist and self-described hacker Dr. Neal Krawetz of Colorado. Krawetz, who makes his living a computer security consultant, tells NBC News in interviews and e-mails that the similarities between the October 29, 2004 tape and the September 7, 2007 tape are too great to be coincidental.

[snip]

Krawetz does not believe that al-Qaida used the exact same video it did in 2004. Instead, he suspects that al-Qaida had recorded much more video than it released in 2004. There may have even been two sittings. “The main thing I am getting at: I am not saying that they are the same recording,” he said. “I believe they recorded a speech, changed a little, and then recorded some more. (Under this same theory, they may have done it many times and AQ just has not released other videos yet).”

“I am saying the two videos were likely made either on the same day or within days of each other.”

[snip]

The CIA will not say what it thinks about the possibility, but a senior U.S. intelligence official tells NBC News the U.S. believes the tape is new. He would not discuss the reasons why intelligence analysts feel that way. Another even more senior intelligence official dismissed the possibility that that beard is fake, but would not discuss the reason for the darkened beard.

Despite the debate over the most recent Bin Laden video, there is no debate among private analysts or intelligence officials about the increasing use of digital editing, in some cases sophisticated editing in the videos released by al-Qaida.

Krawetz said there is no evidence of video editing on the scale seen in the videos of his deputy Ayman al Zawahiri.

Krawetz noted in one recent video, Zawahiri was featured in what appeared to be a library, complete with a desk, a banner, a bookshelf and even a toy cannon mounted on the bookshelf.


IntelCenter
Ayman al-Zawahiri’s September 29. 2006 video
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All of it, Krawetz said, was created digitally using software like 3DStudio. Even the lettering on the banner was added separately. The software permits the creation of wire frame images that can be inserted over a green screen.

“They use multiple overlays,” said Krawetz. “I suspect they have a portable green screen or black fabric they use for the shoot, then edit the video with multiple overlays,” all of which can be seen in a forensic analysis of the video.

“You can tell the number of times it was layered and the order in which the layers were added,” Krawetz added. And a close examination can even determine whether the “green screen” has wrinkles in it. Krawetz said he has noticed the same wrinkle in several Zawahiri videos.

None of the software they use is particularly expensive, says Krawetz. The most basic software, from Adobe or Microsoft, can yield the required effects. (Evan Kohlmann, the NBC News counter terrorism analyst, says most of the software is probably pirated, that every major jihadi site has a download section filled with software from companies as big as Microsoft or Adobe.) Nor is the editing time-consuming, especially since digital editing is now so common in al-Qaida videos.

Labels: al-Qaeda

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior members of Al Qaeda.

Many of the spectacular car bombings and killings you see are as a result of al Qaeda -- the very same folks that attacked us on September the 11th. A major enemy in Iraq is the same enemy that dared attack the United States on that fateful day.

Labels: al-Qaeda, George W. Bush, incompetence

Captured Iraqi documents and intelligence interrogations of Saddam Hussein and two former aides "all confirmed" that Hussein's regime was not directly cooperating with al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion of Iraq, according to a declassified Defense Department report released yesterday.

The declassified version of the report, by acting Inspector General Thomas F. Gimble, also contains new details about the intelligence community's prewar consensus that the Iraqi government and al-Qaeda figures had only limited contacts, and about its judgments that reports of deeper links were based on dubious or unconfirmed information. The report had been released in summary form in February.

The report's release came on the same day that Vice President Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's radio program, repeated his allegation that al-Qaeda was operating inside Iraq "before we ever launched" the war, under the direction of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the terrorist killed last June.

"This is al-Qaeda operating in Iraq," Cheney told Limbaugh's listeners about Zarqawi, who he said had "led the charge for Iraq." Cheney cited the alleged history to illustrate his argument that withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq would "play right into the hands of al-Qaeda."

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), who requested the report's declassification, said in a written statement that the complete text demonstrates more fully why the inspector general concluded that a key Pentagon office -- run by then-Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith -- had inappropriately written intelligence assessments before the March 2003 invasion alleging connections between al-Qaeda and Iraq that the U.S. intelligence consensus disputed.

The report, in a passage previously marked secret, said Feith's office had asserted in a briefing given to Cheney's chief of staff in September 2002 that the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda was "mature" and "symbiotic," marked by shared interests and evidenced by cooperation across 10 categories, including training, financing and logistics.

Instead, the report said, the CIA had concluded in June 2002 that there were few substantiated contacts between al-Qaeda operatives and Iraqi officials and had said that it lacked evidence of a long-term relationship like the ones Iraq had forged with other terrorist groups.

"Overall, the reporting provides no conclusive signs of cooperation on specific terrorist operations," that CIA report said, adding that discussions on the issue were "necessarily speculative."

The CIA had separately concluded that reports of Iraqi training on weapons of mass destruction were "episodic, sketchy, or not corroborated in other channels," the inspector general's report said. It quoted an August 2002 CIA report describing the relationship as more closely resembling "two organizations trying to feel out or exploit each other" rather than cooperating operationally.

The CIA was not alone, the defense report emphasized. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) had concluded that year that "available reporting is not firm enough to demonstrate an ongoing relationship" between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, it said.

But the contrary conclusions reached by Feith's office -- and leaked to the conservative Weekly Standard magazine before the war -- were publicly praised by Cheney as the best source of information on the topic, a circumstance the Pentagon report cites in documenting the impact of what it described as "inappropriate" work.

Mr. Cheney has virtues as a candidate in his own right. He has foreign policy experience by virtue of having served as defense secretary, and he has economic policy experience, having served as a leading tax-cutter while a member of the House of Representatives. His wife, Lynne, would be an asset to the ticket in her own right, a point made by Kathryn Jean Lopez in a post on the topic at National Review Online back in February. By our rights, Lynne Cheney would make one of the greatest First Ladies in history. Mr. Cheney, in any event, is more than four years younger than Mr. McCain, and, if elected, would be 67 years old at his inauguration, younger than Reagan was when he took office. His health, while a topic of frequent speculation, hasn't interfered with his service as vice president.

Lawrence Kudlow wrote a column a while back saying he hoped President Bush asked Vice President Cheney to run for president in 2008. It was a fine idea then and it still is — not because the current field is particularly weak, but because Mr. Cheney is so much more experienced and shrewd a figure, one who could help settle some of the arguments about the Bush years in favor of Mr. Bush. A White House aiming to get Mr. Cheney elected could also avoid some of the hazards that befall lame-ducks — drift, brain drain, irrelevance. Such a campaign might lift Mr. Cheney 's own standing in the polls.

The vice president's stature would put him instantly into the first rank of contenders on the Republican side. On Monday, speaking in Alabama, the vice president received such a warm greeting that he began his remarks by saying, "A reception like that is almost enough to make you want to run for office again." It is hard to imagine the vice president did not comprehend how tantalizing such a remark would be. He used the same opening line on March 24 when he spoke to the leadership of the Republican Jewish Coalition. This is not an endorsement, and there are things we find attractive about many of the other candidates. But for those of us who are concerned with extending Mr. Bush's campaign for freedom around the world and cutting taxes at home, a Cheney campaign is attractive.

In the same Alabama speech in which Mr. Cheney quipped about wanting to run for office again, he said, " America is a good and an honorable country. We serve a cause that is right, and a cause that gives hope to the oppressed in every corner of this earth. We're the kind of country that fights for freedom, and the men and women in that fight are some of the bravest citizens this nation has ever produced. The only way for us to lose is to quit. But that's not an option. We will complete the mission, and we will prevail." What a contrast to the carping over tactics that has infected some of the Republican field and to the fever among the Democrats for cutting off funds for our GIs and sounding a retreat.

Labels: al-Qaeda, Dick Cheney, Saddam Hussein

The ratings rise of “24” has stalled as audiences defect from the downer of terrorists to the supernatural uplift of “Heroes.” Cable surfers have tuned out Iraq for a war with laughs: the battle over Anna Nicole’s decomposing corpse. Set this cultural backdrop against last week’s terrifying but little-heeded front-page Times account of American “intelligence and counterterrorism officials” leaking urgent warnings about Al Qaeda’s comeback, and ask yourself: Haven’t we been here before?

If so, that would be the summer of 2001, when America pigged out on a 24/7 buffet of Gary Condit and shark attacks. The intelligence and counterterrorism officials back then were privately sounding urgent warnings like those in last week’s Times, culminating in the President’s Daily Brief titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” The system “was blinking red,” as the C.I.A. chief George Tenet would later tell the 9/11 commission. But no one, from the White House on down, wanted to hear it.

The White House doesn’t want to hear it now, either. That’s why terrorism experts are trying to get its attention by going public, and not just through The Times. Michael Scheuer, the former head of the C.I.A. bin Laden unit, told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann last week that the Taliban and Al Qaeda, having regrouped in Afghanistan and Pakistan, “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States” (the real United States, that is, not the fictional stand-in where this same scenario can be found on “24”). Al Qaeda is “on the march” rather than on the run, the Georgetown University and West Point terrorism expert Bruce Hoffman told Congress.

[snip]

The surge supporters who accuse the Iraq war’s critics of emboldening the enemy are trying to deflect attention from their own complicity in losing a bigger battle: the one against the enemy that actually did attack us on 9/11. Who lost Iraq? is but a distraction from the more damning question, Who is losing the war on terrorism?

The record so far suggests that this White House has done so twice. The first defeat, of course, began in early December 2001, when we lost Osama bin Laden in Tora Bora. The public would not learn about that failure until April 2002 (when it was uncovered by The Washington Post), but it’s revealing that the administration started its bait-and-switch trick to relocate the enemy in Iraq just as bin Laden slipped away. It was on Dec. 9, 2001, that Dick Cheney first floated the idea on “Meet the Press” that Saddam had something to do with 9/11. It was “pretty well confirmed,” he said (though it was not), that bin Laden’s operative Mohamed Atta had met with an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague months before Atta flew a hijacked plane into the World Trade Center.

In the Scooter Libby trial, Mr. Cheney’s former communications aide, Catherine Martin, said that delivering a message on “Meet the Press” was “a tactic we often used.” No kidding. That mention of the nonexistent Prague meeting was the first of five times that the vice president would imply an Iraq-Qaeda collaboration on that NBC show before the war began in March 2003. This bogus innuendo was an essential tool for selling the war precisely because we had lost bin Laden in Afghanistan.

[snip]

It is precisely by pouring still more of our finite military and intelligence resources down the drain in Iraq that we are tragically ignoring the lessons of 9/11. Instead of showing resolve, as Mr. Bush supposes, his botch of the Iraq war has revealed American weakness. Our catastrophic occupation spawned terrorists in a country where they didn’t used to be, and to pretend that Iraq is now their central front only adds to the disaster. As Mr. Scheuer, the former C.I.A. official, reiterated last week: “Al Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan. If you want to address the threat to America, that’s where it is.” It’s typical of Mr. Bush’s self-righteousness, however, that he would rather punt on that threat than own up to a mistake.

[snip]

Yet Mr. Bush still denies reality. Ten days ago he told the American Enterprise Institute that “the Taliban have been driven from power” and proposed that America help stabilize the Pakistan border by setting up “Reconstruction Opportunity Zones” (remember that “Gulf Opportunity Zone” he promised after Katrina?) to “give residents the chance to export locally made products to the United States, duty-free.” In other words, let’s fight terrorism not by shifting America’s focus from Iraq to the central front, but by shopping for Taliban souvenirs!

Five years after 9/11, the terrorists would seem to have us just where they want us — asleep — even as the system is blinking red once again.

Labels: 9/11, al-Qaeda, Frank Rich, George W. Bush

We've always overestimated the damage we did to the Taliban in Afghanistan. We didn't close the borders there, we won the cities, but the Taliban and al-Qaeda escaped basically intact, and they've been rebuilding and re-equipping over the last five years...

This is a very strange administration, sir. But we really don't take the transnational threat seriously, the terrorist threat. We're pretty good at nation-states, but on al-Qaeda, we still have a government that as a whole, both parties, doesn't take this threat very seriously. The idea that we're going to try to do with 40,000 troops in Afghanistan what the Soviets couldn't do with 150,000 troops is a bit of madness...

The central place in terms of an attack inside the United States is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When the next attack occurs in America, it will be planned and orchestrated out of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Al-Qaeda values Iraq primarily for the entre it gives them into Jordan, into Syria, into the Arab Peninsula and into Turkey. For example, we've really signed Jordan's death warrant through the war in Iraq. But actually, the people who will plan the next attack inside the United States are those who are in Afghanistan and Pakistan...

This administration, sir, seems to be afraid of almost anything that moves. And certain Iraq was a containable country. The Iranians are no threat to the United States unless we provoke them. They may be a threat to the Israelis, they're not a threat to the United States. The threat to the US inside the US comes from al-Qaeda, al-Qaeda is in Afghanistan and Pakistan, if you want to address the threat to America, that's where it is....

...we don't treat this Islamist enemy as seriously as we should. We think somehow we're going to arrest them one man at a time. These people are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States and we're going to have absolutely nothing to respond against. It's going to be a unique situation for a great power, and we're going to have no one to blame but ourselves.

Labels: al-Qaeda, George W. Bush, Rudy Giuliani

Senior leaders of Al Qaeda operating from Pakistan have re-established significant control over their once-battered worldwide terror network and over the past year have set up a band of training camps in the tribal regions near the Afghan border, according to American intelligence and counterterrorism officials.

American officials said there was mounting evidence that Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, had been steadily building an operations hub in the mountainous Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan. Until recently, the Bush administration had described Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri as detached from their followers and cut off from operational control of Al Qaeda.

The United States has also identified several new Qaeda compounds in North Waziristan, including one that officials said might be training operatives for strikes against targets beyond Afghanistan.

American analysts said recent intelligence showed that the compounds functioned under a loose command structure and were operated by groups of Arab, Pakistani and Afghan militants allied with Al Qaeda. They receive guidance from their commanders and Mr. Zawahri, the analysts said. Mr. bin Laden, who has long played less of an operational role, appears to have little direct involvement.

Officials said the training camps had yet to reach the size and level of sophistication of the Qaeda camps established in Afghanistan under Taliban rule. But groups of 10 to 20 men are being trained at the camps, the officials said, and the Qaeda infrastructure in the region is gradually becoming more mature.

The new warnings are different from those made in recent months by intelligence officials and terrorism experts, who have spoken about the growing abilities of Taliban forces and Pakistani militants to launch attacks into Afghanistan. American officials say that the new intelligence is focused on Al Qaeda and points to the prospect that the terrorist network is gaining in strength despite more than five years of a sustained American-led campaign to weaken it.

Labels: 9/11, al-Qaeda, George W. Bush