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A US congressional probe into the Sept. 11 attacks has concluded that the al-Qaeda has trained between 70,000 to 120,000 terrorists and a significant number of them were placed inside the United States, a Democrat lawmaker said Sunday.
Senator Bob Graham, former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and Democratic presidential candidate, said the Bush administration has approved the estimate on the number of trained al-Qaeda terrorists even though the fully classified report is still under review at the FBI and CIA.
"We have to assume that as those people were placed around the world, some of them were placed inside the United States; some of them are in the United States today," he said on NBC's "Meet the Press."
Graham said by launching war against Iraq, the Bush administration had taken focus off of "the major threat" to the lives of Americans in terms of foreign forces.
"We have lost focus. We allowed the al-Qaeda to regroup and regenerated. They've conducted a series of very sophisticated operations - thus far none of them in the United States. But seven Americans were killed in Saudi Arabia," Graham said, referring to the bombings on three Saudi housing compounds on May 12.
The senator declined to give the estimated number of the al-Qaeda operatives hiding in the United States, only saying "it is asignificant number."
The US House of Representatives and Senate intelligence panels, after months of investigation, wrapped up a report on the Sept. 11 attacks on Dec. 20. Graham, who has criticized the Bush administration repeatedly for delaying release of the report, said he hoped the final report would be released before the end of this month.
(Xinhua News Agency July 14, 2003)
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