Leading members of Senate and House intelligence committees say Hizbullah is more powerful than Al Qaida and is threatening new attacks.
They said the intelligence community must increase its surveillance of the
Iranian-backed Shi'ite movement as Islamic insurgents are undergoing
training in such countries as Lebanon and Syria.
"I would state it is a certainty that such an attack will be attempted,"
Sen. Bob Graham, outgoing chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee said on Wednesday.
Graham said the U.S. intelligence community cannot ignore the Hizbullah
threat, Middle East Newsline reported. He said the warning by Hizbullah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah
was not merely rhetoric, but rather a statement of intentions.
"Within the last two weeks, the leader of Hizbullah,
which is the most competent terrorist group in the world, not Al Qaida, has
indicated that it is now going to expand from its traditional focus on
Israel and Palestine to a global perspective, and that the United States is
part of that target."
The senator suggested a U.S. military effort against Hizbullah and other
insurgency headquarters in Lebanon and Syria. He said a major mistake of the
U.S. intelligence community was its failure to eliminate Al Qaida training
camps in Afghanistan in the late 1990s.
"There's a lesson there, which is that we need to be asking the
question, where are the next generation of terrorists being trained?" Graham
asked. "And we know the answer to that question Ñ primarily in Syria and
the Syrian controlled areas of Lebanon, and in Iran. And yet we have, in my
judgment, been derelict in not attacking the headquarters and those training
camps, as we were derelict in the 1990s in not doing likewise in Afghanistan
against Al Qaida."
The House and Senate intelligence committees released a report on
Wednesday that cited a major U.S. intelligence failure in the Al Qaida
suicide attacks on New York and Washington in September 2001. The report
called on senior members of the intelligence community to be reprimanded or
replaced.
Sen. Richard Shelby, the ranking Republican on the intelligence
committee, said the United States will be the target of a major attack on
American soil and the intelligence community must be prepared. Shelby,
slated to become chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, said the U.S.
intelligence community must invest greater efforts in following financing to
and from Islamic insurgency groups. He said Saudi Arabia must be convinced
to end financing to groups on the State Department list of terrorist
organizations.
"I think some countries Ñ and obviously Saudi Arabia is who I'm talking
about Ñ can't have it both ways," Shelby said. "You know, their people and
a lot of their leaders, and probably even into the royal family, in my
judgment, I believe they cannot support charities, so-called charities, that
support terrorism on a big scale, and then portend that they're our friends
or our allies."
The members of the committee said the CIA and FBI did not provide full
cooperation to Congress in its investigation of the Al Qaida attacks. They
said they hoped both agencies would eventually release material requested by
the intelligence committees, particularly regarding Saudi Arabia.
