Al-Qaida tentacles circle the world, Bush contends

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — President Bush and his aides presented Americans on Tuesday with a vision of "tens of thousands" of terrorists still very much in business, but a much higher number offered earlier in the day met with raised eyebrows from intelligence experts.

Afghanistan’s al-Qaida bases are smashed and their occupants are gone, captured or dead. But beyond those borders it may be a different story — one of an organization alive, with nerve centers spreading from Asian jungles to European cities.

It was that view of al-Qaida that administration officials, pressing for the largest increase in military spending in 20 years, wanted Americans to keep in mind when hearing Bush’s State of the Union speech Tuesday night.

But White House officials ran into skepticism from intelligence experts when they claimed, as Bush adviser Karen Hughes put it, that "as many as 100,000 terrorists were trained in Afghanistan’s camps" — a number far larger than estimated before. They later backed off.

"Al-Qaida has never had that kind of strength," said Stanley Bedlington, a former CIA terrorism analyst.

David Isby, author of several books on Afghanistan and its war with the Soviet Union, said: "I think that may well be a decimal place too high, especially if you’re talking about people who got real terrorist training, rather than just got their picture taken on a knocked-out tank."

Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network is shredded in Afghanistan, its principal home for five years, and its fleeing fighters have yet to regroup as a significant force anywhere else, U.S. intelligence suggests.

Yet, bin Laden and most of his lieutenants have eluded their hunters. And their organization’s sphere of influence — its own cells as well as al-Qaida-trained local insurgents in dozens of countries — has not been taken apart.

But a senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said later that figure included all fighters who came to Afghanistan dating back to the 1979 Soviet occupation — many fighting on the side supported by the United States.

U.S. officials believe 15,000 to 20,000 terrorists have been trained in al-Qaida’s Afghan camps since bin Laden established them in 1996.

Bush’s speech settled on "tens of thousands."

Jeffrey Richelson, an intelligence expert at the Washington-based National Security Archive, said it’s possible the more worrisome picture of al-Qaida’s reach has been pieced together from captured fighters like those imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.