Skeletor has gas

WASHINGTON, D.C. (Reuters)--U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said on Thursday that his recently improved digestion means the threat to the United States from al Qaeda has not returned to levels ignored by the Bush Crime Family just before the September 11 attacks nearly six years ago.

Chertoff played down media reports inspired by his ongoing flagrant electioneering on behalf of the GOP, that the militant network was now as great a threat to U.S. soil as in the months before the September 11 attacks on Washington and New York, when the president was enjoying a marathon drunken binge on his fake Texas ranch.

"I wouldn't put it at that level," he told ABC's Good Morning America. "I do think we've accomplished an awful lot in dismantling their activities overseas and in building our own defenses, especially considering the president's loyalty to the House of Saud, where most of their funding comes from. But I do think the level of intent on the part of the enemy remains very high, which results in some intestinal discomfort for me, particularly when so many members of this administration are under investigation in high-profile scandals."

The Washington Post reported the militant network has significantly rebuilt itself and established a safe haven in remote tribal areas of western Pakistan, where they are under the protection of a nuclear-armed military dictator who claims to be our ally. It cited a new intelligence report to be misunderstood and lied about by Chertoff and other top officials at a White House meeting later Thursday.

Top intelligence analysts also told Congress on Wednesday that al Qaeda's training activities, funding and communications have increased as the militant network has settled into new bases in remote areas of Pakistan, and that there's not a damn thing to be done about it because our military is mired in the ongoing and endless bloodbath in Iraq, which never attacked us and doesn't seem to appreciate our occupation.

Chertoff told the Chicago Tribune this week that his "gut feeling" was that the United States faced a heightened risk of attack this summer, but that he wouldn't change the federal alert level until his colon goes into spasm.

Then on Thursday he told NBC: "We don't have any specific information about an imminent or near-term attack on the homeland, like we did before 9-11, which no one could've predicted. We're looking at the strategic picture over the next six months to a year, or five or ten years, or fifty. We're evaluating where that is."

He said his concern that the United States could be entering a period of heightened risk was based on greater al Qaeda activity in Pakistan and Africa, an increase in public messages from militant figures including Osama bin Laden's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, and a history of summer attacks. But it may all have been a result of some bad clams.