The director of national intelligence affirmed rather bluntly today that the U.S. intelligence community has authority to target American citizens for assassination if they present a direct terrorist threat to the United States.

“We have made complex, multi-team attacks very difficult for al Qaeda to pull off, but as we saw with the recent rash of attacks last year…identifying individual terrorists, small groups with short histories using simple attack methods, is a much more difficult task,” Blair said.

Blair said U.S. intelligence was rapidly working to counter the emerging problem. “There are some technical things, which are making it more difficult, with the use of social networking as opposed to simply looking at a Web site and responding by e-mail.”