New U.S. terror threats predicted

Bush officials unite to make budget request

? Speaking with one voice, President Bush’s top intelligence and military officials said Wednesday that terrorists were regrouping for possible new strikes against the United States.

They said the best defense was for Congress to approve the president’s military and anti-terror budget. But some in Congress, including prominent Republicans, were questioning some of that spending.

Offering few specifics on terror threats, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told a House hearing that the government could reasonably predict attacks would come from terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and other means.

Meanwhile, new CIA Director Porter Goss told the Senate Intelligence Committee the Iraq war was giving terrorists experience and contacts for future attacks, and FBI Director Robert Mueller expressed worry that a sleeper operative in the U.S. may have been in place for years, awaiting orders for an attack.

“I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,” Mueller said in remarks he submitted to the senators.

Rumsfeld told the House Armed Services Committee that the proposed $419 billion defense package for 2006 would set an ambitious course to “continue prosecuting the war and to attack its ideological underpinnings.”

Yet the Republican-controlled Congress may exercise its considerable authority over federal spending and reject White House requests to simply sign the checks.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and Rep. Jerry Lewis, R-Calif., the new chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, said lawmakers were questioning billions in foreign aid and State Department spending that Bush requested in an emergency bill this week.

DeLay, R-Texas, said some of Bush’s foreign aid proposals “probably do not qualify” for the treatment he’s seeking.

The current congressional debate over how to allocate billions of dollars on initiatives aimed at spreading peace and ensuring security follows three years of massive spending in response to the 9-11 attacks.