US: Senior members of the Bush administration went on the Sunday TV talk shows yesterday to claim that America was winning the war against al-Qaeda, despite Thursday's train bombing in Madrid, while at the same time acknowledging that the US was vulnerable to a similar attack. Conor O'Clery in New York, reports.
Republican Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called the Spanish bombing "very sophisticated" and most likely carried out by the al-Qaeda "European division" with the intent of affecting Spain's elections.
"We have been very fortunate we have not had an attack," he told CNN, adding that first Saudi Arabia and Indonesia and now Spain had their "real wake-up call" about the dangers of terrorism.
US National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, said that America was not yet safe, and that "from time to time" terrorists would pull off new attacks, but claimed the US had rounded up two-thirds of the leadership and was hurting al-Qaeda.
Asked about the terrorists' ability to kill 200 people in Madrid, Ms Rice told NBC's Meet the Press, "They are going to win skirmishes in the war on terrorism. . . but they are losing." Regarding a claim that Madrid was targeted in retribution for Spain's support of the US war on Iraq, she said: "We are at war with these people and, yes, they will try and attack those who will help us defeat them."
Events in Spain were "just more evidence of the lengths these killers will go to intimidate people", but the attitude - 'we won't bother them if they don't bother us' - could not be tolerated after 9/11 when terrorists committed an act of war against the United States.
"We are succeeding," she said. "Slowly but surely their role is getting smaller, not larger. Slowly but surely their world is getting smaller." Ms Rice stated that people "should stop speculating" about the failure to find Osama bin Laden, saying: "We are on the hunt for him. We will find him when we find him. The best news is that he is on the run."
US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also argued on CNN that the world was safer because of US action against Al-Qaeda. "We are better organised today," he said. "We believe we are safer and more secure because we put pressure on that network."
Former Democratic candidate for president, Howard Dean, said that the Madrid bombing showed that the war on Iraq did not made the US any safer. Al-Qaeda now had a "beachhead" in Iraq which it didn't have before the US went in. "This administration did not tell the truth," he told NBC's Meet the Press. "Did the capture of Saddam Hussein make us safer? The answer is no."
Saddam Hussein was a "pathetic old man whom we had been containing for 12 years by overflights. It turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction, no relationship with Al-Qaeda." America had lost the moral leadership in the world, Mr Dean said.
One would be "hard pressed to find a majority in any country where people admire the United States, and that's not in the best interests of America in fighting terrorism." US Secretary of State Colin Powell told CBS it was too early to say whether al-Qaeda was behind the bombings in Spain, but warned that it meant "nobody's immune" from terrorism, whether it was Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Indonesia, Spain, Germany and France.
He did not think the case had been made that the Madrid bombings would cause Spain to step back from the war on terrorism.
Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman warned that the US had not done enough to defend its transport systems, except for aviation.
There was no money in the Homeland Security budget for rail transportation safety, including particularly bridges and tunnels, he said.