The al-Qaeda in Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) is seen by the US national security team as an affiliate of the al-Qaeda posing greatest potential threat to the country, the White House has said.
"While, al-Qaeda core and its leadership in Afghanistan and Pakistan has been decimated and is not nearly what it was 10 years ago, al-Qaeda in general and its affiliate organisations -- as we've been talking about for years now -- continue to represent threats," the White House Press Secretary Jay Carney said yesterday.
"And AQAP in particular is viewed by the national security team as the most operational of the al-Qaeda affiliates and the one that poses the greatest potential threat to the United States," he told reporters at his daily news conference.
Carney said it is absolutely the case that there is a constant stream of potential threats out there to the United States because there are people around the world who want to do harm to the US and harm to American citizens.
"Assessments are made by our national security team based on the information available to them about the level of potential threats and the precautions that need to be taken in response to those," he said.
"But we have to maintain our vigilance as a nation because those threats exist," he added.
The threat emanating from and potentially occurring in the Arabian Peninsula is of the nature that the US can't rule anything out.
"And therefore, we've taken precautions beyond the Arabian Peninsula, both with our diplomatic facilities and through other measures," he said.
The current threat he said is very real.
"Therefore, we took the very deliberate action that we took as an administration to ensure that out of an abundance of caution, some facilities were temporarily closed and some individuals are removed from Yemen, for example," he said.
"This was not the ongoing generalized reality that we have groups and individuals out there in the world who want to do harm to the United States. This was more specific than that," he added.
