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Al-Qaida may 'reward' American president with strike aimed at keeping him in
office, senior intelligence man says.

...........

A senior US intelligence official is about to publish a bitter condemnation
of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the west is losing the
war against al-Qaida and that an"avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked" war
in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands.

Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, due out next
month, dismisses two of the most frequent boasts of the Bush administration:
that Bin Laden and al-Qaida are"on the run" and that the Iraq invasion has
made America safer.

In an interview with the Guardian the official, who writes as"Anonymous",
described al-Qaida as a much more proficient and focused organisation than
it was in 2001, and predicted that it would"inevitably" acquire weapons of
mass destruction and try to use them.

He said Bin Laden was probably"comfortable" commanding his organisation
from the mountainous tribal lands along the border between Pakistan and
Afghanistan.

The Pakistani army claimed a big success in the"war against terror"
yesterday with the killing of a tribal leader, Nek Mohammed, who was one of
al-Qaida's protectors in Waziristan.

But Anonymous, who has been centrally involved in the hunt for Bin Laden,
said:"Nek Mohammed is one guy in one small area. We sometimes forget how
big the tribal areas are." He believes President Pervez Musharraf cannot
advance much further into the tribal areas without endangering his rule by
provoking a Pashtun revolt."He walks a very fine line," he said yesterday.

Imperial Hubris is the latest in a relentless stream of books attacking the
administration in election year. Most of the earlier ones, however, were
written by embittered former officials. This one is unprecedented in being
the work of a serving official with nearly 20 years experience in
counter-terrorism who is still part of the intelligence establishment.

The fact that he has been allowed to publish, albeit anonymously and without
naming which agency he works for, may reflect the increasing frustration of
senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken.

Peter Bergen, the author of two books on Bin Laden and al-Qaida, said:"His
views represent an amped-up version of what is emerging as a consensus among
intelligence counter-terrorist professionals."

Anonymous does not try to veil his contempt for the Bush White House and its
policies. His book describes the Iraq invasion as"an avaricious,
premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but
whose defeat did offer economic advantage.

"Our choice of timing, moreover, shows an abject, even wilful failure to
recognise the ideological power, lethality and growth potential of the
threat personified by Bin Laden, as well as the impetus that threat has been
given by the US-led invasion and occupation of Muslim Iraq."

In his view, the US missed its biggest chance to capture the al-Qaida leader
at Tora Bora in the Afghan mountains in December 2001. Instead of sending
large numbers of his own troops, General Tommy Franks relied on surrogates
who proved to be unreliable.

"For my money, the game was over at Tora Bora," Anonymous said.

Yesterday President Bush repeated his assertion that Bin Laden was cornered
and that there was"no hole or cave deep enough to hide from American
justice".

Anonymous said:"I think we overestimate significantly the stress [Bin
Laden's] under. Our media and sometimes our policymakers suggest he's hiding
from rock to rock and hill to hill and cave to cave. My own hunch is that
he's fairly comfortable where he is."

The death and arrest of experienced operatives might have set back Bin
Laden's plans to some degree but when it came to his long-term capacity to
threaten the US, he said,"I don't think we've laid a glove on him".

"What I think we're seeing in al-Qaida is a change of generation," he
said."The people who are leading al-Qaida now seem a lot more professional
group.

"They are more bureaucratic, more management competent, certainly more
literate. Certainly, this generation is more computer literate, more
comfortable with the tools of modernity. I also think they're much less
prone to being the Errol Flynns of al-Qaida. They're just much more careful
across the board in the way they operate."

As for weapons of mass destruction, he thinks that if al-Qaida does not have
them already, it will inevitably acquire them.

The most likely source of a nuclear device would be the former Soviet Union,
he believes. Dirty bombs, chemical and biological weapons, could be
home-made by al-Qaida's own experts, many of them trained in the US and
Britain.

Anonymous, who published an analysis of al-Qaida last year called Through
Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike
against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the
intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid
bombing, but of keeping the same one in place.

"I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one
they have now," he said.

"One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would
rally the country around the president."

The White House has yet to comment publicly on Imperial Hubris, which is due
to be published on July 4, but intelligence experts say it may try to
portray him as a professionally embittered maverick.

The tone of Imperial Hubris is certainly angry and urgent, and the stridency
of his warnings about al-Qaida led him to be moved from a highly sensitive
job in the late 90s.

But Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA
counter-terrorism centre, said he had been vindicated by events."He is very
well respected, and looked on as a serious student of the subject."

Anonymous believes Mr Bush is taking the US in exactly the direction Bin
Laden wants, towards all-out confrontation with Islam under the banner of
spreading democracy.

He said:"It's going to take 10,000-15,000 dead Americans before we say to
ourselves: 'What is going on'?"

PS:
Die Pentagon-Lobby und die NeoCons werden an ihren Schachzügen erkannt!