WASHINGTON — The State Department added 11 militant Islamic groups to its official list of terrorist organizations Wednesday but said that international efforts had reduced worldwide terrorist attacks and doubled the number of Al Qaeda members in custody to more than 3,000.
In releasing the report, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said that around the world, "terrorist cells have been broken up, networks disrupted and plots foiled." Yet he warned that despite the progress, terrorists are planning "appalling crimes and trying to get their hands on weapons of mass destruction."
"We cannot and will not relax our resolve," he added.
Separately, U.S. officials said a new terrorism intelligence center is scheduled to begin operations today.
The Terrorist Threat Integration Center is supposed to solve information-sharing problems that plagued the CIA, the FBI and other agencies in the months before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The center was announced by President Bush in his State of the Union address last year. It initially will be based at CIA headquarters, with about 50 analysts and other experts, largely drawn from the CIA and FBI.
John Brennan, a longtime CIA official in charge of the new center, said it will have access to a variety of intelligence data and will produce a daily "threat matrix" distributed to top government officials. The matrix was previously drafted each day by the CIA and the FBI.
Brennan also said the center will provide the "analytic basis" for the government's color-coded threat alert system.
In the annual terrorist activity survey, the State Department left unchanged its list of state sponsors of terrorism: Iraq, Iran, Syria, North Korea, Sudan, Libya and Cuba. Nations on the list are ineligible for U.S. economic aid and arms sales and barred from buying so-called dual-use products that could be used for both civilian and military purposes.
Now that Saddam Hussein has been overthrown, Powell has recommended that Bush drop U.S. sanctions against Iraq, officials said.
Syria was included on the list even as Powell prepared to visit Damascus to seek greater cooperation from Syrian President Bashar Assad. Officials acknowledged that Syria has helped the United States in its hunt for Al Qaeda operatives but criticized the country for continuing to host and support such groups as Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
