Al-Qaeda will likely try to attack the United States after the presidential elections, two former FBI experts told Ronald Kessler of Newsmax.com. They argued that Al-Qaeda would not attack before the elections out of a fear that it’d help elect Senator McCain, and they felt that Al-Qaeda would want to wait so they could test the new president.

“If my analysis is on the mark, al-Qaeda has already chosen its target and the time to stage its attack,” the report quoted Frederick Stremmel, a former high-level FBI counter-terrorism analyst as saying.

“I believe the most dangerous time in the near future for this country will be between Election Day and President Bush’s last day in office,” said James R. Fitzgerald, who was an FBI interviewer at Guantanamo Bay, where the U.S. is holding suspected terrorists captured on the battlefield.

Other counter-terrorism experts think that Al-Qaeda will try to influence the elections by launching an attack, possibly overseas.

“There is an expectation that Al-Qaeda will try to influence the November elections by attempting attacks globally,” the New York Sun quoted Roger Cressey, a former counter-terrorism official as saying in mid-October.

Not all experts agree that you can predict Al-Qaeda’s operations based on events like elections. The Newsmax.com report also quoted Kevin R. Brock, the former principal deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center as saying that Al-Qaeda does not have a history of following “dependable, predictable patterns.” Brock stated that an accurate prediction of when Al-Qaeda would attack would be “based more on luck than hard intelligence."