WASHINGTON, 17 March 2003 — The United States is within reach of dismantling the leadership of the Al-Qaeda terrorist network, the Washington Post reported yesterday, quoting White House and US intelligence experts.
Officials from the US Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been cautious about making public pronouncements about the impending demise of Al-Qaeda, but counterterrorism experts told the daily that the arrest and subsequent cooperation under interrogation of Al-Qaeda lieutenant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed earlier this month have given them concrete reasons to believe that the capture of top officers from the terrorist network could come soon.
“I believe the tide has turned in terms of Al-Qaeda,” Congressman Porter Goss, chairman of the House intelligence committee and a former CIA case officer, told the newspaper. “For the first time,” Goss told the Post, “they have more to fear from us than we have to fear from them.”
Officials said they were still concerned about possible bombings and attacks on a smaller scale than those mounted against the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon just outside Washington in 2001.
Nevertheless, they said, Mohammed’s capture in the Pakistan city of Rawalpindi on March 1 cut off the organization’s key operational leader from followers poised to execute attacks.
The cache of computer and paper files found in the house where Mohammed was living has turned out to be “a mother lode” of information, said one intelligence official, providing hundreds of leads” about the organization’s financing, followers, movement of operatives and targets, another official told the Post.
