Al Qaeda called an active threat

In a homeland security strategy released Tuesday, the Bush administration warned that help from U.S. allies and the public is needed to thwart an attack on American soil being planned by a reconstituted Al Qaeda.

Frances Fragos Townsend, assistant to the president for counter-terrorism and homeland security, said Osama bin Laden’s terrorist network continues to plot, recruit and organize from a haven in lawless tribal regions of Pakistan. Townsend said Al Qaeda is intent on infiltrating the United States to launch attacks, possibly with weapons of mass destruction.

“There’s no question they’re not only underway; they’re ongoing and have been,” Townsend said of such infiltration efforts in a conference call with reporters.

In the “National Strategy for Homeland Security” issued by the White House’s Homeland Security Council, the administration said such terrorists might use homemade bombs made with readily available materials, as they are doing in Iraq. It also concluded that more should be done to address the emergence of “homegrown extremism” and violent Islamic radicalization in the United States and worldwide. The bulletin said the phenomenon has provided Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with a ready pool of future recruits.

The 53-page document largely echoes previous administration homeland security policies and statements. But it places strong new emphasis on the counterterrorism role played by the private sector, American citizens and U.S. allies overseas.

“To best protect the American people, homeland security must be a responsibility shared across our entire nation,” President Bush wrote in a letter accompanying the report.

One former U.S. government homeland security expert called the new strategy a step in the right direction.

“They are really trying to move the ball in the last few minutes of the last quarter of their administration, when it is a really hard ball to move. They have a number of huge challenges that they have itemized in the document,” said David Heyman, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. He has led a number of government studies on the subject.

“A strategy this late in an administration is helpful and harmful,” Heyman added. “It could free the next administration’s hands by institutionalizing the good things, and tie their hands by institutionalizing the bad things.”

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to vote today on measures to alter the Bush administration’s warrantless domestic spying authority. The bill being considered would impose limits on the administration’s ability to monitor the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens. At the same time, it would allow intelligence agencies to continue intercepting communications of foreigners that move through the U.S., but with at least some oversight by the special federal court that oversees the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The White House said that release of the new report on national security threats was not timed to influence the congressional debate over how to tighten FISA. Townsend and White House officials said the strategy had recently been completed.

They said that it was an update of the first National Strategy for Homeland Security issued in July 2002 and that it was meant to work in tandem with two other White House-issued blueprints: a broader National Security Strategy released in March 2006 and the National Strategy for Combating Terrorism issued in September 2006.

josh.meyer@latimes.com

Times staffer James Gerstenzang contributed to this report.