Washington:
America's top intelligence official told lawmakers on Tuesday that Al-Qaida and its affiliates had made it a high priority to attempt a large-scale attack on US soil within the next six months.
The assessment by Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, was much starker than his view last year, when he emphasized the considerable progress in the campaign to debilitate Al-Qaida and said that the global economic meltdown, rather than the prospect of a major terrorist attack, was the "primary near-term security concern of the United States."
At Tuesday's hearing, Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, asked Blair to assess the possibility of an attempted attack in the United States in the next three to six months. He replied, "The priority is certain, I would say" - a response that was reaffirmed by the top officials of the CIA and the FBI.
Citing a recent wave of terrorist plots, including the failed Dec. 25 attempt to blow up an airliner as it approached Detroit, Blair and other intelligence officials told a Senate panel that Al-Qaida had adjusted its tactics to more effectively strike American targets domestically and abroad.
"The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11," said Leon Panetta, the CIA director. "It is that Al-Qaida is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect."
As the CIA continues its campaign of drone attacks aimed at Qaida operatives in the mountains of Pakistan, the officials also said that the network's splinter groups in Yemen and Somalia were taking on more importance.
But Blair began his annual threat testimony before Congress by saying that the threat of a crippling attack on telecommunications and other computer networks was growing as an increasingly sophisticated group of enemies had "severely threatened" the sometimes fragile systems undergirding the country's information infrastructure.
"Malicious cyberactivity is occurring on an unprecedented scale with extraordinary sophistication," he told the Senate Intelligence Committee.
His emphasis on the threat points up the growing concerns among US intelligence officials about the potentially devastating results of a coordinated attack on the nation's technology apparatus, sometimes called a "cyber Pearl Harbor."
He said that the surge in cyberattacks, including the recent penetration of Google's servers from inside China, was a "wake-up call" for those who dismissed the threat of computer warfare.
"Sensitive information is stolen daily from both government and private sector networks, undermining confidence in our information systems, and in the very information these systems were intended to convey," Blair said.
In another departure from last year's testimony, Blair appeared alongside other top intelligence officials, including the heads of the CIA, the FBI and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Last year, the intelligence director sat alone before the committee, a partly symbolic gesture intended to demonstrate the authority of the director of national intelligence, whose office has been criticized for commanding little power over America's 16 intelligence agencies.
At times, the senators seemed more interested in debating one another than in hearing testimony from the assembled witnesses. Midway through the hearing, partisan bickering broke out about whether terrorist suspects ought to be tried in civilian courts and whether the man charged as the Dec. 25 bomber should have been given Miranda rights that could protect him against self-incrimination.
As senators traded barbs, the intelligence officials stared stonily ahead or shuffled their notes.
The intelligence chiefs also raised warnings about nuclear proliferation, particularly focusing on the nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea.
Blair said that Iran "has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity to eventually produce nuclear weapons," and that the recent discovery of a secret enrichment plant near the city of Qum heightened suspicions about Iran's intentions to build a nuclear bomb.
Still, he said that Tehran was following a "cost-benefit approach" to its nuclear decision-making and that it remained unclear whether Iran's leadership would make a political calculation to begin producing weapons-grade uranium, giving other nations the opportunity to "influence" that decision through a variety of diplomatic steps.