WASHINGTON ― Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said on Tuesday that Al Qaeda is improving its ability to attack within the United States by recruiting and training new operatives. At the same time, he said, a terrorist group in Iraq that claims allegiance to Al Qaeda is beginning to send militants to other countries.
Mr. McConnell offered those cautions as he presented to the Senate intelligence committee an annual report on threats to the United States. The report was released as his testimony began.
“Al-Qa’ida is improving the last key aspect of its ability to attack the U.S.: the identification, training, and positioning of operatives for an attack in the homeland,” he wrote in the 47-page document, using an alternate transliteration of the group’s Arabic name.
The warning appeared to echo those contained in a National Intelligence Estimate released last July, and to be based in part on Al Qaeda’s growing ability to use its regenerated presence in the tribal regions of northwestern Pakistan to plan attacks elsewhere.
“While increased security measures at home and abroad have caused al-Qa’ida to view the West, especially the U.S., as a harder target,” Mr. McConnell’s report said, “we have seen an influx of new Western recruits into the tribal areas since mid-2006.”
Mr. McConnell’s overall assessment, representing the consensus view of the country’s intelligence agencies, was decidedly mixed.
The report noted that there were no major terrorist attacks in much of the world over the past year, and suggested that Al Qaeda’s global image was “beginning to lose some of its luster.”
“There was no major attack against the United States or most of our European, Latin American, East Asia allies and partners,” the report said.
Mr. McConnell noted the unraveling of several terror plots in Europe. And he said that the recent reported death of Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior Al Qaeda military commander, in a missile attack in Pakistan was the most serious blow to the group’s top leadership since December 2005, when its external operations chief, Hamza Rabia, was killed.
But the new report warned that Al Qaeda remained a serious threat, and said that its affiliate in Iraq was beginning to export militants for attacks in other countries.
“I am increasingly concerned that as we inflict significant damage on al-Qa’ida in Iraq, it may shift resources to mounting more attacks outside of Iraq,” Mr. McConnell wrote, referring to the Iraqi terrorist group that has claimed allegiance to the international Al Qaeda network.
But the report said that intelligence gleaned from documents captured in Iraq suggested that fewer than 100 ofit’s the Iraqi group’s militants had moved from Iraq to establish cells in other countries.
Mr. McConnell expressed concern about the ways in which globalization had broadened the numbers of threats facing the United States.
“For example, as government, private sector, and personal activities continue to move to networked operations and our digital systems add ever more capabilities, our vulnerability to penetration and other hostile cyber actions grows,” the report said.
The report attempted to calibrate its assessment of the Iranian nuclear threat, following the National Intelligence Estimate last year that concluded that Iran had probably suspended its nuclear weapons work in the fall of 2003. That finding appeared to undercut American diplomatic efforts to press Iran on the nuclear issue.
“We remain concerned about Iran’s intentions and assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons,” the report said.
“We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons,” it said, adding that the only plausible way to prevent Iran from producing such weapons was “an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective.”
On North Korea, the intelligence analysts judge “with at least moderate confidence” that the regime in Pyongyang continues its uranium enrichment efforts today. But it said that the North “probably views its capabilities as being more for deterrence and coercive diplomacy than for war-fighting, and would consider using nuclear weapons only under certain narrow circumstances.”
Further, the report concludes that the North’s Taepo Dong-2 missile, which failed in a flight test in July 2006, “probably has the potential capability to deliver a nuclear-weapon-sized payload to the continental United States.”
“But,” it added, “we assess the likelihood of successful delivery would be low, absent successful testing.”
The committee chairman, Senator John Rockefeller, said in prepared remarks that he was concerned that the Al Qaeda threat had “actually grown since last year’s threat review, particularly in Afghanistan and Pakistan.” American officials have expressed reservations about the ability of the Pakistani government to keep militants out of the rugged area along the Afghan border.
“Al Qaeda has used this border safe haven to reconstitute itself and launch offensive operations that threaten to undo the stability brought to Afghanistan and undermine, if not overthrow, the Pakistan government,” said Mr. Rockefeller, a West Virginia Democrat.
This, Mr. Rockefeller added, gave Al Qaeda “a base of operations from which to plot and direct attacks against the United States.”
At the same hearing, Gen. Michael Hayden, head of the Central Intelligence Agency, confirmed the identities of three men who were videotaped being interrogated by the agency using “waterboarding,” a technique that simulates drowning.
General Hayden said the men were Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001; a senior Al Qaeda operative, Abu Zubaydah; and another man suspected of being a senior operative, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.
General Hayden said they were waterboarded in 2002 and 2003 for two reasons: because the C.I.A. knew very little about Al Qaeda operations, and because the agency feared that more terror attacks were imminent. Both those considerations, he said on Tuesday, have since changed.
Attorney General Michael Mukasey, whose department is investigating the destruction of the agency’s tapes of those interrogations, has refused to rule out the future use of waterboarding. But Mr. McConnell, in his testimony on Tuesday, said that new procedures were in place to limit authorization for using the technique: General Hayden would have to notify Mr. McConnell, who would have to ask Mr. Mukasey, who in turn would have to obtain the president’s approval before authorizing a waterboarding.
