President-elect Barack Obama has been warned by intelligence officials, other government officials and experts in general that Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations are likely preparing to strike against the United States at the moment he takes office. The reason is that a shift in administration always causes some chaos and miscommunication, which is understood by Al Qaeda, which wants to use this time to carry out a 9/11 kind of attack.

Britain’s Lord West of Spithead, the Home Office Security Minister, spoke recently of a “huge threat”, saying: “There is another great plot building up again and we are monitoring this.”

General Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, also said that he fears that Al Qaeda will try to strike during the transition period. “For some people two data points create a trend line. For others, there may be more hesitation to call it that,” Hayden said recently.

He went on to explain that most threats originate from Pakistan’s tribal area. “Today virtually every major terrorist threat that my agency is aware of has threads back to the tribal areas. Whether it’s command and control, training, direction, money, capabilities, there is a connection to the Fata [Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas],” the CIA chief said.

Hayden said that al-Qaeda remained a “determined, adaptive enemy” operating “from its safe haven in Pakistan”. He added: “If there is a major attack on this country it will bear the fingerprints of al-Qaeda.”

Meanwhile, according to British sources an attack is not yet considered “imminent” but the threat is seen as “at the severe end of severe.” This means that they consider the threat posed by terrorists about as serious as it was in 2005, shortly before terrorists killed 52 people in London.

The warnings will make many alarm bells ring considering the fact that America’s next vice president, still Sen. Joe Biden, warned Obama supporters shortly before the presidential election that America would be faced by a major international crisis shortly after he and Obama would take office which would try to “test” the newly elected president. Importantly, Biden said, many would believe that Obama’s reaction would be wrong.