Al Qaeda Seen as the Primary Terrorist Threat for Many Years

by Anthony L. Kimery

'We assess Al Qaeda will continue to try to acquire and employ CBRN material'

“Adaptive and highly resilient,” Al Qaeda “remains the most serious terrorist threat we face as a nation,” said former career CIA official John Brennan in a speech last Thursday at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC.

A former CIA analyst, Saudi Arabia station chief, the Agency's daily intelligence briefer to the White House in 1994 and 1995, deputy executive director and chief of staff to former DCI George Tenet, Brennan today is President Obama’s principal advisor on counterterrorism.

Brennan acknowledged that Al Qaeda’s “intent to carry out attacks against the United States and US interests around the world - with weapons of mass destruction if possible - remains undiminished, and another attack on the US homeland remains the top priority for the Al Qaeda senior leadership.”

Al Qaeda’s “intent to carry out attacks against the United States and US interests around the world with weapons of mass destruction, if possible, remains undiminished, and another attack on the US homeland remains the top priority for the Al Qaeda senior leadership,” Brennan stated.

And it will for decades to come, Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair earlier told the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

“We assess that Al Qaeda and its regional affiliates will continue to plot against the US and its interests abroad over the next twenty years,” Blair stated in his written responses to questions that were posed to him pursuant to the Committee’s February 12 annual hearing on national threats.

That Al Qaeda and its fundamentalist jihadist allies will remain a persistent threat to the United States for many years to come is a point that’s been stressed by other past and present federal counterterrorism officials. ....