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Another terrorist strike almost certain, warns Cheney

United States Vice-President Dick Cheney warned on Sunday that another terrorist attack on the country by Al Qaeda was "almost a certainty" and Americans must "be prepared" to face it.

"It could happen tomorrow, next week, next year, but they're going to keep trying," Cheney told the Fox News television channel.

Asked if the Al Qaeda network, believed to have been behind the September 11 attacks, could be planning to strike again, Cheney answered: "We assume they are. There is a certain level of noise that would indicate that those efforts are continuing."

"There's a great temptation for people," he cautioned, "to look back at September 11 saying that we haven't been hit in eight months, therefore the threats have gone away. I don't think that is the case."

Cheney insisted that nothing the administration knew before September 11 could have led it to anticipate the kind of attack that came that day.

He stressed that it was almost impossible to ensure a cent per cent defence against terrorist attacks. "Having done everything you can, you may still get hit," he remarked.

So the answer is, he continued, to destroy the terrorists, employing both offence and defence, and that is what the administration had been doing in several areas of the world besides Afghanistan.

Cheney said potential targets included modes of transportation. "There is information collected or that comes to our attention that suggests every imaginable conveyance, type of facility, building, geographic location [could be a target]," he said, adding, "A lot of it turns out to be false reporting."

Earlier, in an indication that preparations for new terrorist strikes could be underway, intelligence officials said they had intercepted a vague yet troubling series of communications among Al Qaeda operatives signalling that the outfit was trying to carry out an operation as big as September 11.

"It's again not specific, not specific as to time, not specific as to place," the officials were quoted as saying by The New York Times.

Describing the latest threat as a "second-wave attack", they said it could be carried out overseas too as the interceptions are "general" and have limited the government's approach to "broad defensive measures".

The Federal Bureau of Investigation said it had information that Al Qaeda leaders discussed a possible plan to rent apartment units in the US and plant explosives there.

FBI spokeswoman Debra Weier, however, referred to the information as uncorroborated. "We have no indication that this proposed plan went beyond the discussion stage," she said.

The intelligence officials have compared the intercepts to the pattern of those picked up last spring and early summer when Al Qaeda operatives were overheard talking about a 'big operation'.

Those signals, the paper said, were among the evidence that intelligence agencies presented to President George W Bush, Jr, in August about an imminent attack on the US.

A senior official said the amount of intelligence relating to another possible attack in Europe, the Arabian peninsula or the US had increased in the last month. Some of it comes from interviews with fighters captured in Afghanistan.

Admitting that they had not been able to fully piece together Al Qaeda's plans, the official said, "There's just a lot of chatter in the system again... We are actively pursuing it and trying to see what's going on here."

Some significant changes have been made in the way threat information is studied and circulated within the upper reaches of the Bush administration, the Times said.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the FBI compare notes on all terrorist threat information that comes in each day, filtering the intelligence through an analytical "matrix" to determine which threats are the most credible and deserve the most attention.

The daily threat report is distributed to policy makers and provides a structure for debates among senior officials about whether to issue public warnings, it said, adding that Bush receives daily briefings from the two agencies.

PTI

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