CIA Chief Predicts War With No End

By David Rennie

The Telegraph - UK

www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/02/25/wtenet25.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/02/25/ixworld.html 
2-24-4 WASHINGTON --

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".