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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| Beware the mix of al-Qaeda and WMD |
| 2005-09-09 |
| Britain remains on edge following the July 7 and 21 attacks, as the authorities continue to warn that more strikes are likely and that the public should brace itself for such eventualities. But a conventional terrorist strike may not be the worst in store. While British police and government officials have recently remained silent on the issue, many analysts around the world are concerned that Al-Qaeda or a like-minded group may try to step up its game by escalating to weapons of mass destruction - be they nuclear, chemical, biological or radiological. Prime Minister Tony Blair has in the past gone so far as to warn that "if we do not take a stand now against the growth of this chemical biological and nuclear weapons threat, then at some point a state or a terrorist group, pursuing extremism with no care for human life, will use such weapons." Of course there are a number of reasons why we should remain skeptical of such warnings. First, these claims are being made by the same politicians and intelligence officials responsible for the limited and faulty intelligence about Iraq's WMDcapability prior to the 2003 invasion. Secondly, during the late 1990s there were numerous reports of Al-Qaeda purchasing nuclear suitcase bombs and the like from shadowy Kazakh middlemen, the Chechen mafia, disaffected or rogue elements within the intelligence agencies and scientific communities of East European and Central Asian states. Many of these reports continue to be unsubstantiated and now seem exaggerated and, to say the least, ludicrous. Some have been unequivocally disproved. However, despite this fact there exists a growing body of evidence to indicate there may indeed be a real threat. Testimony of apprehended Al-Qaeda operatives indicates that real efforts have been made by the organization to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Jamal al-Fadl, who gave himself up to the American authorities in 1996, admitted that Al-Qaeda had attempted to purchase uranium in Sudan. Ahmad Ressam, captured on his way to bombing the Los Angeles airport, has testified that he witnessed the testing of chemical substances on dogs at the Durante camp in Afghanistan as part of a training program to prepare Al-Qaeda recruits to employ chemical weapons against humans. The interrogation of Abu Zubayada, Al-Qaeda's head of recruitment during the mid-1990s who was captured in April 2002 in Pakistan, also provided evidence that the organization was interested in manufacturing radiological weaponry. This information took on real significance after the arrest by the United States authorities of Joseph Padilla, an American citizen accused of planning to detonate a radiological device in a U.S. city. Al-Qaeda operatives are not the only ones who have provided information. At the time of the invasion of Afghanistan, Pakistani authorities arrested two nuclear scientists, Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmoud and Chaudahry Abdel-Majid, who were alleged to have been in contact with various Al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama bin Laden, in Afghanistan. Under interrogation they admitted that these discussions focused on radiological weaponry and also nuclear weapons. The later unraveling of the A. Q. Khan nuclear network did not reveal, at least publicly, any connections with terrorist groups, but it did remind us that such networks can be exploited by well-funded and sophisticated terrorist organizations. The 2001 invasion of Afghanistan brought to light additional evidence, including plans found on computers in Kabul, that Al-Qaeda has attempted to acquire weapons of mass destruction to manufacture chemical and biological weapons. It also revealed laboratories in which chemical and biological weapons could have been produced and video footage of chemical experiments on dogs (which appeared to validate Ressam's claims). In 2003 British police uncovered a terrorist plot which involved the manufacture of ricin, and indeed a batch of that substance was recovered. There was a similar find that year in France. Had the security authorities not been successful on those occasions we may already have seen the first terrorist WMD assault on European territory. Certainly Al-Qaeda has not shied away from stating its desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Even if one accepts that talk of a WMD capability is part of Al-Qaeda's highly effective propaganda arsenal, such threats fit in with the organization's core ideology. For much of the last decade, Al-Qaeda and its disciples have been devotees of what has been termed the "rhetoric of mass destruction." The acquisition of WMD appeals to an ideology that legitimizes the mass killing of civilians for what are perceived to be their immense crimes against Islam and the Muslim world. In 1998 and again in 1999 and 2000-2001, bin Laden emphasized that gaining a WMD capability was a "religious duty." As an Al-Qaeda message, broadcast by the Qatari television station Al-Jazeera in November 2002, put it: "Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness are your lot? This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb." In these terms, and at a time when the world recently finished commemorating the 60th anniversary of the use of atomic weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, it is worth noting that in 1996, 2001 and again in 2002, bin Laden raised the issue of the atomic bombings of these cities as evidence of American disregard for life and to highlight the hypocrisy of those condemning Islamist violence. In late 2003 a United Nations panel of experts found that it was only the lack of technical know-how that had prevented Al-Qaeda and those across the globe inspired by its ideology from using chemical or biological weapons. This is a sobering thought that makes preventing such terrorists from acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction the most important objective of the war on terror. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #1 Well, we could do the mixing with AQ and/or the countries supporting it. We spent all that money on Minutemen and Tridents... |
| Posted by: Jackal 2005-09-09 09:39 |