Gauging the seriousness of vague new terror warnings

It's been a week of vague but ominous statements from America's top officials:

FBI Director Robert Mueller called suicide bombings "inevitable." Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge characterized it as "not a question of if, but when." Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said terrorists will "inevitably" acquire weapons of mass destruction and "will not hesitate to use them."

So how are Americans supposed to take rhetoric like that? The absence of any more specific information leaves it unclear just what the new warnings mean – especially since there's been no change in the nation's official level of alert, which remains at code "yellow," the midpoint of the rating system.

Also, the timing of the warnings – so soon after the White House took some flack for possibly failing to act on pre-9/11 threats – has raised questions about whether politics is in any way motivating the warnings.

Yet terror analysts say the empirical evidence does point to a strong likelihood of another attack.

So, in the end, staking out a middle ground between the factual case for inevitability – and the politics of issuing general warnings – is probably a realistic approach, analysts suggest.

"We're just at the beginning of striking the balance between not sharing much information at all and scaring the public to death," says Gregory Treverton, an analyst at Rand Corp. in Santa Monica, Calif. "Having under-warned last summer, we're likely to do some over-warning now."

On a political level, calling future attacks "inevitable" strikes some as, in part, an effort to provide cover for the administration in the event something happens.

"It's not exactly clear what you gain by saying that," notes Mr. Treverton.

The source of the new warnings, officials say, is increased "chatter" in the system – a combination of intelligence gathered abroad, as well as from prisoners in Guantanamo Bay. Administration officials say the pattern of signals is alarmingly similar to that picked up in the months prior to Sept. 11.

Indeed, many experts on terrorism agree that some sort of future incident seems likely, given that Al Qaeda has attempted an attack against American targets every year for nearly a decade and many members of the group are still at large, including Osama bin Laden. The increased turmoil in the Middle East also contributes to the threat, as government officials recently warned that the US could face attacks not only from Al Qaeda but also from other militant Arab groups such as Hamas and Hizbullah.

"Asking if there's going to be another attack is like asking whether there's going to be another war," says Neal Pollard, founding director of the Terrorism Research Center. The threat is not going to go away "until we've removed all the causes of terrorism."

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