Bush: still selling the same broken down old used truck.

Bush warns anew of terror threat

By BEN FELLER, Associated Press Writer 28 minutes ago

President Bush sought Tuesday to strengthen the connection between the terrorist network al-Qaida and the unceasing Iraq war, prodding people to remember the threat of attack at home.

By stressing al-Qaida's burgeoning operation in Iraq, Bush again aimed to frame the war in the public's mind as a matter of protecting the United States. Yet the war itself has turned into a valuable recruiting tool for al-Qaida, senior intelligence officials concede...

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Al-Qaida, led by Osama bin Laden, orchestrated the terrorist strikes on the United States by turning hijacked airplanes into killing machines. That was almost six years ago.

Now a fresh intelligence estimate warns that the United States is in a heightened threat environment, mainly from al-Qaida. The terror group is seizing upon its affiliate, al-Qaida in Iraq, to recruit members and organize attacks, the report found.

Bush sees such linkage as grounds for sticking with the fight in Iraq.

Yet his critics argue just the opposite point — that the war is not reducing the threat to America, but increasing it by swelling and unifying al-Qaida's numbers.

Al-Qaida had no active cells in Iraq when the U.S. invaded in March 2003, and its operation there is much larger now than before the war, U.S. intelligence officers say...

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In broad strokes, Bush's approach links the Iraq war to an event that Americans remember deeply — the Sept. 11 attacks — as not the sectarian strife among Iraqis. That violent infighting among Iraqis has caused much of the United States to see little point in the U.S. mission...[Open in new window]