Bin Laden Deep Underground But Terror Network Expanding, Says Obama

Washington, D.C., United States (AHN) – Affirming that increased military pressure has forced Osama bin Laden and his leaders to go into hiding deep underground thereby disrupting their operations, U.S. President Barack Obama, nevertheless noted that bin-Laden’s arrest, though a top priority, will not solve all the nation’s security problems.

Addressing a group of reporters at a White House conference on the ninth anniversary of the September 11 terror attacks, Obama implicitly acknowledged the existence and potential threat of other terrorist groups out to attack the U.S. “I think that, in this day and age, there is always going to be the potential for an individual or a small group of individuals, if they are willing to die, to kill other people,” he said.

Adding, “Some of them are going to be very well organized, and some of them are going to be random. That threat is there.”

Last June, CIA Director Leon Panetta told ABC News that Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda presence in Afghanistan was now “relatively small…I think at most we’re looking at maybe 50 to 100.” The FBI has determined that at the time of the 9/11 attacks, the original membership of the Al Qaeda was 200 sworn members.

Nevertheless, being a small ideological group primarily meant to inspire, influence and train other jihadist groups, was always the plan to begin with, and in recent years, the objective appears to have succeeded in that a number of Al Qaeda franchises have sprouted in the Middle East and North Africa acting independently with little or no contact with bin-Laden.

This was confirmed by a group led by two former 9/11 Commission chairmen who issued Friday, a report that the terror threat has grown more complex and could not be thwarted in one, two, five or ten years.

And Obama who is aware of this, encourages the nation to stand firm, “It’s important, I think, for the American people to understand and not to live in fear; it’s just a reality of today’s world that there are going to be threats out there,” he said.

Obama also said that though homeland security has “greatly improved” since the 9/11 attacks, he cautioned that, “we don’t start losing who we are or overreacting if, in fact, there is the threat of terrorism out there.”

“We go about our business. We are tougher than them. Our families and our businesses and our churches and mosques and synagogues and our Constitution and our values, that’s what gives us strength,” he noted. “We are going to have this problem out there for a long time to come, but it doesn’t have to completely distort us, and it doesn’t have to dominate our foreign policy. What we can do is to constantly fight against it,” Obama said.

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