Top U.S. intelligence chief says al-Qaida hides in Pakistan

WASHINGTON – Al-Qaida, increasingly shut down in Iraq, is establishing cells in other countries as Osama bin Laden’s organization uses a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal region to train for attacks in Afghanistan, the Middle East, Africa and the U.S. the U.S. intelligence chief said Tuesday.\n“Al-Qaida remains the pre-eminent threat against the United States,” Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told a Senate hearing more than six years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.\nHe said fewer than 100 al-Qaida terrorists have moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries as the U.S. military clamps down on their activities, and “they may deploy resources to mount attacks outside the country.”\nThe al-Qaida network in Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan has suffered setbacks, but he said the group poses a persistent and growing danger. He said al-Qaida maintains a “safe haven” in Pakistan’s tribal areas, where it is able to stage attacks supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan.\nThe Pakistani tribal areas provide al-Qaida “many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan, albeit on a smaller and less secure scale,” allowing militants to train for strikes in Pakistan, the Middle East, Africa and the U.S., McConnell said.\nTerrorists use the “sanctuary” of Pakistan’s border area to “maintain a cadre of skilled lieutenants capable of directing the organization’s operations around the world,” McConnell told the Senate Intelligence Committee.\nThe next attack on the U.S. will most likely be launched by al-Qaida operating in “under-governed regions” of Pakistan, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, planned to tell Congress on Wednesday.\n“Continued congressional support for the legitimate government of Pakistan braces this bulwark in the long war against violent extremism,” Mullen states in remarks prepared for a separate budget hearing and obtained by The Associated Press.\nThe U.S. has expressed growing concern that al-Qaida figures who fled Afghanistan after the ouster of the Taliban regime in 2001 have been able to regroup inside tribal regions, posing a threat not just to U.S. forces across the border, but offering a potential base for global operations.\nU.S. officials have said they believe that bin Laden is taking refuge in the Pakistani tribal region, likely on the Pakistani side of the border.\nStill, McConnell praised Pakistan’s cooperation in the fight against extremists, saying that hundreds of Pakistanis have died while fighting terrorists. He said Islamabad has done more to “neutralize” terrorists than any other partner of the United States.\nDespite the Pakistani cooperation, Lt. Gen. Michael Maples, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the Pakistani military has been unable to disrupt or damage al-Qaida terrorists operating in the tribal border region. And the U.S. military is prohibited by Pakistan from pursuing Taliban and al-Qaida fighters that cross the border to conduct attacks inside Afghanistan.\nMcConnell also told the Intelligence Committee that the Taliban, once thought to be routed from Afghanistan, has expanded its operations into previously peaceful areas of the west and around the capital of Kabul, despite the death or capture of three top commanders in the last year.\nAt the same hearing, CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly confirmed for the first time the names of three suspected al-Qaida terrorists who were subjected to a particularly harsh interrogation technique known as waterboarding, and why.\n“We used it against these three detainees because of the circumstances at the time,” Hayden said. “There was the belief that additional catastrophic attacks against the homeland were inevitable. And we had limited knowledge about al-Qaida and its workings. Those two realities have changed.”