Threat Assessments More Ritual Than Substance

(Feb. 3) -- CIA chief Leon Panetta warned Tuesday of new al-Qaida attacks in the agency's annual assessment of the nation's terror threats. The U.S. could expect an attack in the next three to six months, he told Congress.

"The biggest threat is not so much that we face an attack like 9/11. It is that al-Qaida is adapting its methods in ways that oftentimes make it difficult to detect," Panetta told the Senate Intelligence Committee. The terrorist group is sending "clean" recruits, whose ties to terrorism are hard to trace, as well as inciting homegrown terrorist sympathizers, he added.

Grim stuff, especially as the warnings come just over a month since the failed attempt on Christmas to bring down an airliner at Detroit, and a few months after U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan was charged with attacking his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, killing 13 people. Then again, the annual terror assessment never paints a rosy picture or offers specifics, so it's difficult to read much into it.

Take, for example, the last public assessment offered by the CIA during the George W. Bush administration. In November 2008, CIA Director Michael Hayden said al-Qaida remains "the most clear and present danger to the United States today." He also said that were a terrorist strike to occur in the U.S., "it will bear the fingerprints of al-Qaida." Yet there were no warnings of the terrorist attacks that actually occurred in the following year -- the Detroit airline bombing attempt, the Fort Hood shootings -- even though in both cases there were plenty of warning signs that intelligence officials should have picked up.

The previous year's White House terrorism assessment also was short on specifics, merely stating the obvious: "We judge the U.S. homeland will face a persistent and evolving terrorist threat over the next three years. The main threat comes from Islamic terrorist groups and cells, especially al-Qaida, driven by their undiminished intent to attack the homeland and a continued effort by these terrorist groups to adapt and improve their capabilities."

"Knock me over with a feather -- al-Qaida is still trying to attack us," one official told the Los Angeles Times upon reading that 2007 assessment. "It's nothing new. It just reinforces what we already know." (For those interested, the CIA archives its annual threat assessments, going back nearly two decades. Here's one from 1996.)

To a large degree, such assessments serve the purpose of covering a president's backside -- and preventing the kind of fallout that followed the 9/11 attacks. Soon after 9/11, Bush and Clinton loyalists battled over who was to blame for the intelligence breakdown. Declassified CIA memos -- including the president's daily brief from Aug. 6, 2001, titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." -- revealed that Bush had been warned of the al-Qaida threat.

But looking back at the CIA's pre-9/11 threat assessment is instructive. In his testimony to Congress, then CIA Director George Tenet identified Osama bin Laden as the nation's top terrorist threat and noted that al-Qaida was "becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated." That's no less specific than any threat assessments delivered post-9/11.

There's a paradox, which CNN's Paula Newton, among others, has identified. The CIA is "unwilling to share any of their material 'intelligence,' the kind that would have potentially tipped off a few suspecting citizens as mass terror plots have unfolded around the world in the last decade," she writes. "The intelligence community would doubtless argue that to do so would compromise operations and compromise important individuals."

Yet for the nation's intelligence agencies, which have taken so much heat for failing to stop 9/11 and subsequent terrorist attacks, it might be better to continue its annual public ritual, however meaningless, than to say nothing at all.