Most Terror Hints Point Overseas

(CBS)  Despite increased worries about a possible terror attack on the United States, most intelligence points to any imminent attack occurring overseas.

The FBI has warned that the car-bombings in Saudi Arabia last week indicate the al Qaeda terrorist network remains active and could launch new attacks in the United States.

In fact, U.S. officials tell CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin they have intelligence the attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco were intended as diversions to focus American attention on threats abroad while Al Qaeda lays plans for an attack inside the United States.

Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan told reporters Monday in Riyadh, "my gut feeling tells me something big is going to happen here (in Saudi Arabia) or in America."

And law enforcement sources confirm to Martin that within the past two months two Arab men have been quietly arrested in the United States on suspicion they had been sent to scout out targets for al Qaeda.

But the terrorist organization also could hit U.S. and Western targets overseas, the FBI said in its advisory to state and local law enforcement agencies.

CBS News State Department Reporter Charles Wolfson reports the U.S. Embassy in Riyadh and American consulates in Dhahran and Jeddah will be closed on Wednesday and might not reopen until Sunday at the earliest.

In the United States, however, the federal alert status remained unchanged at "yellow," an elevated level, but one that is in the mid-range of the five-tier warning scale below orange and red.

It has gone to orange, or high alert, three times: during the first anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, in February this year and again during the war in Iraq.
Speaking on the CBS News Early Show, presidential spokesman Ari Fleischer said there would be White House meetings Tuesday on the terror alert status.

"It's a day-to-day judgment that the experts make based on the latest analysis," he said. Fleischer also told NBC that "chatter" picked up by U.S. agencies suggested new attacks were possible.

A spokeswoman at the Department of Homeland Security said Tuesday there were no plans to raise the domestic terror alert level.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told lawmakers: "Today we are significantly safer than we were 20 months ago."

"We are safer because Congress and the president have devoted an unprecedented amount of training and resources to this effort," he said, but quoted Winston Churchill in warning, "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is perhaps the end of the beginning."

U.S. counterterrorism officials have said the bulk of the intelligence on al Qaeda operations points to possible strikes overseas.

Since the end of the war in Iraq, there have been three attempts to attack Western interests in Muslim countries: the suicide bombings in Saudi Arabia and Morocco and a failed plot to fly a small plane into the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, Pakistan. All three countries were mentioned by al Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden as potential targets in an audiotape released shortly before the war started.

The U.S. intelligence community "assesses that attacks against U.S. and Western targets overseas are likely; attacks in the United States cannot be ruled out," said the FBI bulletin, which was described to The Associated Press Monday by federal law enforcement officials on condition of anonymity.

The FBI is assisting Saudi authorities in the investigation of the bombings on three Saudi housing compounds that killed 34 people, including eight Americans. Al Qaeda also is suspected in another series of bomb attacks Friday in Casablanca, Morocco, that killed 41 people.