25 February 2004
CIA chief predicts war with no end
By David Rennie
Daily Telegraph

America's assault on al-Qa'eda has scattered its terrorist expertise across the globe, meaning that the United States will be menaced by Islamic extremism "for the foreseeable future", the CIA director, George Tenet, said yesterday.

He offered the Senate intelligence committee a bleak vision of a war on terrorism without end, in which even the destruction of al-Qa'eda would not make America safe.

The CIA chief, a Clinton appointee, has become a target of Washington's hawks, who have blamed his agency for flawed pre-war intelligence on Iraq and called for his resignation.

Mr Tenet said American operations had created "disarray in al-Qa'eda's central leadership" and destroyed safe havens in Pakistan, Yemen and Saudi Arabia.

But Osama bin Laden's destructive expertise had been broadly disseminated throughout the extremist branches of Sunni Islam.

He added that intelligence had uncovered "chilling" plots involving ships, aircraft and "special weapons".

Isambard Wilkinson in Gilgit writes: the Pakistani army captured 20 suspected terrorists, including several Arabs, yesterday after launching an offensive against al-Qa'eda and the Taliban in the country's tribal areas. Commandos and hundreds of troops cordoned off three villages near Wana in South Waziristan and conducted door-to-door searches.