Bush Nominee: Ideas Must Be Focus of War on Terror

By ELI LAKE, Staff Reporter of the Sun
May 7, 2008

WASHINGTON — President Bush's choice to lead the principal agency charged with coordinating both counterterrorism operations and synthesizing intelligence says killing and capturing jihadists is one facet of the wider war, which must focus on the battlefield of ideas.

At his confirmation hearing yesterday, Michael Leiter said America is fighting a "full-spectrum war," of which law enforcement and "kinetic" operations are but one part. Kinetic force, he said, is "high explosives. It's going out and killing people. For a certain population, that is probably the right answer."

The testimony represents a change in emphasis for the Bush administration, which spent its first four-year term stressing the kinetic side of what the president calls "the global war on terror."

The shift may have come last July, when a National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Al Qaeda had reconstituted its ability to launch operations in its new base in the Federal Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan, along the border with Afghanistan.

Mr. Leiter, who is expected to be confirmed by the Senate as director of the National Counterterrorism Center, is spearheading the new approach.

"There are pieces of Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that will only be incapacitated through either kinetic means or law enforcement," he said in response to a question from Senator Feinstein, a Democrat of California. "That means that is one end of the spectrum. I would say in the FATA and elsewhere, whether it's North Africa or East Africa, we have to do a better job of coordinating that kinetic force with other aspects of national power."

Mr. Leiter, who is presently acting director of the counterterrorism center, was praised yesterday by both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. The chairman of the panel, Senator Rockefeller of West Virginia, said at the end of the hearing that he would be surprised if the committee did not confirm Mr. Leiter's nomination by unanimous vote.

Mr. Bush's choice was introduced by a former Democratic senator of Virginia, Charles Robb, who got to know Mr. Leiter on a special commission he co-chaired, which examined the intelligence failures on weapons of mass destruction before the Iraq war. The final report of that commission is the strongest official rebuke to date of a theory that blamed the intelligence failures in the run-up to the war on political pressure from the White House and civilian leadership at the Pentagon.

Asked by the vice chairman of the committee, Senator Bond of Missouri, whether Al Qaeda in Iraq poses the greatest threat to America in the war, Mr. Leiter said: "Senator, to the extent that we have military forces in Iraq, Al Qaeda in Iraq, which continues to exist, poses the most direct threat to U.S. interests, to those troops in Iraq."

When Mr. Bond asked what the impact would be if American forces left Iraq and Al Qaeda developed a safe haven there, Mr. Leiter said, "Were Al Qaeda to have a safe haven in Iraq, I would assess that safe haven would pose a very similar threat to the United States and U.S. interests as does the FATA in Pakistan, and from my perspective, that's a dire threat."