WASHINGTON Ñ The United States has concluded that Al Qaida has
trained up to 120,000 insurgents in a global campaign against the West.
The assertion is contained in a classified report of a congressional investigation into the
Sept. 11, 2001 suicide strikes by Al Qaida in New York and Washington. The report, which could be released as early as August, is said to
provide new details on Al Qaida and its supporters in Gulf Cooperation
Council states.
Sen. Bob Graham, a former chairman of the Senate Select Intelligence
Committee and candidate for president, released some details of the
congressional report, which remains under review by the CIA and FBI. Graham
said the report concludes that Al Qaida has trained between 70,000 and
120,000 people in what he termed were terrorist tactics.
Graham and other U.S. senators have accused the Bush administration of
withholding the release of the congressional report. The Florida Democrat
said the assessment of Al Qaida's training program was approved by the Bush
administration and the U.S. intelligence community, Middle East Newsline reported.
The report said many of those trained were sent to Africa, Asia, Europe
and the United States to serve as operatives and sleepers. Most of the Al
Qaida operatives were trained in a network of camps in Afghanistan from 1995
to 2001.
"We have to assume that as those people were placed around the world,
some were placed inside the United States," Graham said in a U.S. television
interview on Sunday. "Some of them are in the United States today."
"We allowed Al Qaida to regroup and regenerate," Graham, citing the U.S.
war in Iraq, said. "They've conducted a series of very sophisticated
operations, thus far none of it in the United States, but seven Americans
were killed in Saudi Arabia."