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“We Are Going to Get
Hit Again”
Mark Hosenball and Jeffrey
Bartholet
Newsweek
Tuesday Aug 28, 2007
Al Qaeda has an active plot to hit the West. The United States
knows about it but doesn’t have enough tactical detail to
issue a precise warning or raise the threat level, says Vice Admiral
(ret.) John Scott Redd, who heads the government’s National
Counterterrorism Center. In an interview at his headquarters near
Washington, D.C., Redd told Newsweek’s Mark Hosenball and
Jeffrey Bartholet that the country is better prepared than ever
to counter such threats. But he also believes another successful
terror attack on the U.S. homeland is inevitable. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: People in various agencies have said that since
Tora Bora in 2001, they at no time have had even 50-percent confidence
that they knew where Osama bin Laden was on any particular day,
and therefore they have been unable to mount any operations to
go get him. Is that wrong?
Redd: What I’ll tell you about bin Laden is if we knew
where he was, he’d either be dead or captured. It’s
that simple. [He’s] obviously a tough target. That whole
area is a tough target. And my standard answer on OBL is: remember
[convicted Atlanta Olympics bomber] Eric Rudolph. Nobody likes
to hear it but, I mean, here’s a guy [who was on the run]
in the United States of America. We had unlimited access—the
FBI, local law enforcement—and the guy hid out for an awful
long time just by keeping a low profile. One reporter said the
other day, “Well, gee, you’ve got all this great overhead
stuff and various surveillance things.” I said, “Yeah.
I’d trade those for about three great human sources.”
(Article continues below)
Why do people believe bin Laden’s still alive?
Well, I guess the question is, why do you believe he’s
dead? I think we’re into the longest period we’ve
gone without hearing from him, but we’ve done this before.
Back in ’05, I think [the length of time we didn’t
hear from bin Laden] may have been a week shorter than [the period
of his silence] now. So, yeah, we haven’t heard from him
[since spring 2006]. People are starting to say, “He’s
dead. He’s dead.” Quite frankly, we think that if
he had died it would have become known. It would be very hard
to keep that from leaking out.
Also, there are periodic rumors about him suffering from
this disease or that disease, needing dialysis, having to get
some exotic drug. Is any of that credible?
The short answer is, we don’t know. There are those sporadic
reports indicating illness, indicating incapacitation, but nothing
firm.
Ayman al-Zawahiri seems to have much more freedom of
expression, as it were, which implies more freedom of movement.
His tapes now are reasonably well produced.
We saw almost a 300-percent increase in media stuff in 2006 out
of all of Al Qaeda, and I think this year we are heading toward
that mark already, or getting ahead of that. They are becoming
more sophisticated. They are not relying on Al Jazeera or you
folks to get the message out. They are using the Internet. They’ve
got a fairly well-oiled, if you will, media group. They are doing
things like going after a different audience or going after a
larger audience, by using subtitles.
English-language…
German, Italian, a number of different things. So they have become
more sophisticated.
So they actually upload this stuff on the Internet directly?
Well, Ayman al-Zawahiri doesn’t sit there and say, “Press
and upload.”…But you know, what you see is sort of
a desire to put themselves on the map. So Zawahiri, I think he
had 15 videos last year—and he’s almost there [this
year]. He’ll certainly get there this year, if not more,
but you’re also seeing a broader spectrum of [Qaeda] people
talking about subjects. To be crass about it, it kind of reminds
me of a CEO in a start-up company in Silicon Valley. What do you
want to do? You want your name out there. So you put out press
releases. It helps your funding base—in that case, capitalists,
in this case, people who fund Al Qaeda.
While we’re on this topic, what can you tell us
about Pakistan’s release of Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, who
allegedly was a top Al Qaeda communications and computer guy and
is now roaming free?
Obviously, we’re not exactly happy about that. We have a
legal system, and the Pakistanis have a legal system, which was
designed for a different era. I won’t go into their legal
system because I am not an expert on it, but the [Pakistani] Supreme
Court said, “You’ve got to release this guy,”
and, you know, he’s out for a variety of reasons.
What does the progression of terror cases in Britain
tell you? Two years ago terrorists actually managed to kill some
people. This year it’s these two clowns in Glasgow. They
were doctors and engineers who seemed to have some connection
to Pakistan and/or Iraq, yet they couldn’t build a bomb.
What does this tell you about the evolution of the organization,
the evolution of the front-line terrorists?
It shows you the advantage of having a safe haven—a place
where you can take someone and not just say, “Here is the
formula. Godspeed and go do something,” but rather, “Let’s
[try] it. Let’s make it. Let’s see it go bang.”
Iraq is a giant university for bombmakers.
But, see, they don’t have to [make] it there. They just
buy the explosives. It’s HBX or C4. There’s so much
explosive material around there.
But if they wanted to teach people, they certainly could.
But you don’t have to make C4. You put a detonator in it
with a 99-percent likelihood that sucker is going to go off. And
they are very good at that.
Is there evidence, though, that they are training people
in Iraq to do operations abroad?
AQI has done—certainly under Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi—“external
operations” [in Jordan]. I am not going to comment on the
most recent U.K. thing and whether there was a connection.
The Europeans have been concerned about traffic between
Iraq and Europe.
There’s always a concern. Frankly, with what is going on
inside Iraq right now, it is probably fair to say that Abu Ayyub
al-Masri [the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq] pretty much has his
hands full, although not completely.
Tell us about the threat that emerged earlier this year.
We’ve got this intelligence threat; we’re pretty certain
we know what’s going on. We don’t have all the tactical
details about it, [but] in some ways it’s not unlike the
U.K. aviation threat last year. So we know there is a threat out
there. The question is, what do we do about it? And the response
was, we stood up an interagency task force under NCTC leadership.
So you have all the players you would expect: FBI, CIA, DHS, DIA,
DoD, the operators—the military side comes into that—participating
in an integrated plan, but integrated in a much more granular
and tactical way than we’ve ever done before. This is my
40th year in government service, 36 in uniform and almost four
as a civilian. This is revolutionary stuff, and it is affecting
the way we do business.
Earlier this summer, there was talk that people were
picking up chatter that reminded them of the summer before 9/11.
The Germans basically said this is like pre-9/11. They said, “We
are very worried.” What do you make of this?
We have very strong indicators that Al Qaeda is planning to attack
the West and is likely to [try to] attack, and we are pretty sure
about that. We know some of the precursors from—
Attack Europe?
Well, they would like to come West, and they would like to come
as far West as they can. What we don’t know is…if
it’s going to be Mark Hosenball, and he’s coming in
on Flight 727 out of Karachi, he’s stopping in Frankfurt,
and he’s coming on through with his European Union passport,
and he’s coming into New York, and he’s going to do
something. I mean, we don’t have that kind of tactical detail.
What we do have, though, is a couple of threads that indicate,
you know, some very tactical stuff, and that's what—you
know, that’s what you’re seeing bits and pieces of,
and I really can’t go much more into it.
But this did not affect our threat level. We didn’t
change our code.
We’re pretty high-threat right now. Until you know something
that is going to make a difference, you know, you don’t
necessarily change the threat level. What that does is really
stir a lot of people up and get them ticked off, but it probably
doesn’t accomplish very much.
And you don’t as of today see any particular reduction
in that threat?
It’s still there. It’s very serious, you know, and
we’re watching it. We’re learning more all the time,
but it’s still a very serious threat.
Last thing: Are we winning or losing the war on terrorism?
This is a long war. People say, “What is this like?”
I say it’s like the cold war in only two respects. Number
one, there is a strong ideological content to it. Number two,
it is going to be a long war. I’ll be dead before this one
is over. We will probably lose a battle or two along the way.
We have to prepare for that. Statistically, you can’t bat
1.000 forever, but we haven’t been hit for six years, [which
is] no accident.
I will tell you this: We are better prepared today for the war
on terror than at any time in our history. We have done an incredible
amount of things since 9/11, across the board. Intelligence is
better. They are sharing it better. We are taking the terrorists
down. We are working with the allies very carefully. We are doing
the strategic operational planning, going after every element
in the terrorist life cycle. So we have come a long way. But these
guys are smart. They are determined. They are patient. So over
time we are going to lose a battle or two. We are going to get
hit again, you know, but you’ve got to have the stick-to-itiveness
or persistence to outlast it.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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