WASHINGTON'CIA Director George Tenet offered a sober assessment Wednesday of al Qaeda's capabilities, warning Congress that Osama bin Laden's terrorist network has not been destroyed and is working on plans for new attacks against the United States.
\Al Qaeda leaders still at large are working to reconstitute the organization and to resume its terrorist operations,"" Tenet told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in a rare public appearance.
He said bin Laden's network remains ""the most immediate and serious threat"" to the United States. In perhaps his most startling disclosure, Tenet said that newly discovered documents found in Afghanistan ""show bin Laden was pursuing a sophisticated biological weapons research program."" A senior intelligence official said interrogations of al Qaeda fighters captured in Afghanistan and arrested elsewhere further substantiated this concern.
Earlier information had shown the terrorist leader was seeking to acquire radioactive materials for a ""dirty"" bomb, but there had been no hard evidence he was pursuing biological weapons.
In his testimony, Tenet also said the CIA has gathered evidence showing bin Laden's network had considered multiple high-profile attacks against American landmarks, major airports, bridges, harbors and dams, along with U.S. government buildings at home and diplomatic and military facilities abroad. The upcoming Winter Olympics in Utah, Tenet said, would ""fit the terrorists' interest in striking another blow within the United States that would command worldwide media attention.""
Tenet's appearance before Congress represented his first public assessment of the terrorist threat since the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and the fighting in Afghanistan. His testimony was the most detailed acknowledgment from the Bush administration that the United States has not achieved two of its key goals in the war on terrorism'the capture or killing of bin Laden and Taliban leader Mohammad Omar' despite the toppling of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and the arrest of nearly 1,000 al Qaeda operatives around the world.
In another sign of the continuing effort to hunt down terrorist leaders, administration officials separately revealed that two days ago, a Predator unmanned surveillance aircraft controlled by the CIA fired two Hellfire missiles in eastern Afghanistan at what were believed to be al Qaeda leaders.
A senior administration official said the individuals ""were standing outside near' sport utility vehicles. The CIA used the missiles on the Predator because no U.S. fighter aircraft were in the vicinity, the official said. He would not speculate on whether bin Laden may have been in the group, but added that U.S. Army personnel were trying to get into that area to identify who had been involved.
Tenet also gave an emotional defense of the intelligence community's performance both before and after the Sept. 11 attacks, as he responded to one of his strongest critics, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., vice chairman of the committee.
Shelby said Wednesday that a joint House-Senate inquiry would try to determine ""why we were caught completely by surprise"" by the attacks.
Tenet described for the first time his belief that in July and August, the operational tempo of al Qaeda declined overseas.
""It was very clear that what had been planned had been delayed,"" he said, adding that ""it was very clear in our minds that this country was a target.\
