Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the threat of a major terror attack against the United States in the next three weeks was perhaps the equivalent of 8 on a scale of one to ten. “You might be at eight,” Ridge said late Friday night in an interview on the ABC television program Nightline when pressed to quantify the threat. But he described the rating system as more of an art than a science. Hours earlier, the government raised its terrorist threat index for only the second time, warning that newly acquired intelligence indicated a “high risk” of attacks by al Qaeda guerrillas on U.S. targets at home and abroad. Full Story