CIA analyst refutes Pentagon assessment that Al Qaida has been weakened

Recently retired CIA counterterrorism analyst Michael Scheuer said last week
that the Al Qaida terrorist network remains extremely dangerous and has not
been devastated, as many U.S. government officials maintain.

Scheuer told reporters at a breakfast that "the media part of Al Qaida" that
uses the Internet to communicate its ideas is fully intact and can respond
publicly within hours. It is fully functioning despite whatever disruptions
were caused to its leadership by arrests and killings of its leaders.

"I think we labor under a false assumption if we view Al Qaida as a
terrorist organization that we were fighting in the '70s and '80s," he said.
"If that were the case, the directorate of operations would have destroyed
Al Qaida root and branch."

Scheuer said claims by U.S. officials that two-thirds of the Al Qaida
leadership is destroyed and that Osama Bin Laden cannot communicate with his
troops are misleading.

"There is no evidence to support that," he said.

"Al Qaida is an insurgent organization that is patterned after the Afghani
insurgency [in the 1980s]," Scheuer said.

One of the most important elements of Al Qaida planning is that it plans to
lose leaders and replace them, he said.

Al Qaida has prepared "understudy" leaders to replace those who are caught
or killed, he said.

U.S. intelligence has no clear idea how large Al Qaida is as an
organization, he said, and therefore it is difficult to determine attrition
rates of the group. "I would be very hesitant to tell the American people
that Al Qaida is dysfunctional, or dispersed, or on the edge of extinction,"
he said.