WASHINGTON, May 31: CIA director Michael Hayden came under stiff challenge for portraying Al Qaeda as on the defensive after global setbacks, even in its safe havens along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.

Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Jay Rockefeller said Hayden’s upbeat appraisal was not consistent with intelligence assessments provided to his committee over the past year.

“In fact, I have seen nothing, including classified intelligence reporting, that would lead me to this conclusion,” Rockefeller said in a scathing letter to the Central Intelligence Agency director.

Hayden’s assessment — one of the most positive since the September 11, 2001 attacks — comes less than a year after US intelligence warnings that Al Qaeda had regrouped in the border area and was plotting attacks against the West.

“On balance, we are doing pretty well,” Hayden told the Washington Post in an interview published on Friday.

But Rockefeller cited a litany of public statements by top intelligence officials over the past year that emphasised Al Qaeda’s regeneration in Fata.

Earlier this month, National Counter-Terrorism Centre’s acting director Michael Leiter told lawmakers that US efforts had not succeeded in stopping “core Al Qaeda plotting.”

“We’re better at disrupting it, but we have not disrupted the senior leadership that exists in the Fata, and we have also not stopped the organisation from promulgating a message which has successfully gained them more recruits,” Rockefeller quoted him as saying.

Bruce Riedel, a long-time former CIA analyst now associated with Brookings Institution, called Hayden’s remarks “a pretty large dish of wishful thinking.”

“I think that the administration very much wants to paint a picture of success, particularly as it gets close to the end of eight years,” he said.

“So I’m not surprised we’re seeing an effort to portray it in the most optimistic possible way,” he said.

Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri remain at large, and the US intelligence estimate in July 2007 said Al Qaeda had regenerated a new cadre of leadership in Pakistan.—AFP