Ex-official sees progress against al-Qaida

The U.S. government is steadily winning the battle against terrorist organizations like al-Qaida but should be prepared for more attacks that will kill civilians, former U.S. counterterrorism official Philip Mudd, said in a speech Monday.

Mudd said he and other U.S. counterterrorism officials believe that the jihadist revolution that spawned al-Qaida and other affiliated groups has crested and is dying from strategic errors and countermoves by the U.S. and other governments.

"I think the movement is dying," Mudd told an audience at George Washington University's Homeland Security Policy Institute. "We succeeded in slowly, slowly stemming the tide of a revolution."

But he said even the "tail of a comet" can be lethal and predicted that more deadly attacks will occur.

"We will lose lives in this country," said Mudd, who served as deputy director of the FBI's national security branch and as deputy director of the CIA's National Counterterrorist Center. After his retirement from the government in March, he became a senior fellow at the policy institute.

Mudd said the reach of the revolutionary ideology that spawned al-Qaida has grown to include what he termed "affiliates" and "like-minded" groups. He acknowledged, for example, that arrests of people in the United States for planning terrorist attacks have gone up in the last year.

But he said many of those plotting attacks are emotionally driven and do not understand or actually believe the underlying revolutionary ideology, which makes it possible to turn them away from carrying out attacks.

He added that terrorist organizations in other countries have made the strategic error of killing too many innocent civilians, which has turned people against them.

Still, Mudd believes that the struggle against these groups will last 10 or 20 more years. He said he believes the likelihood that those groups will carry out an attack using a nuclear bomb or anthrax is declining. But there is "a decent chance" that they will be able to attack using a "low-level chemical device" that causes panic inside the United States, he said.

Mudd touched on some of the most controversial issues surrounding U.S. counterterrorism efforts. For example, he said the CIA's use of enhanced interrogation methods, such as waterboarding, yielded valuable intelligence. He said he is upset with those who criticize actions taken years ago to prevent attacks.

Mudd was nominated by President Obama to head the Homeland Security Department's intelligence and analysis division but had to withdraw over controversy that he was linked to the CIA's interrogation program.

In his remarks, Mudd added that he believes it is unfair for people to demand that an agency like the FBI prevent attacks but then complain when agents make a mistake in using counterterrorism powers, such as national security letters, which are demands for information without court orders. The Justice Department's inspector general found abuses in past years with the use of national security letters.