The Spectre Of A Nuclear Al Qaeda Looms
…Most chilling of all was Zawahiri’s decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because “we have something better in mind.”…
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department’s director of intelligence, he’s responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.
With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature — a mushroom cloud.
We’ve all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists’ job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen’s analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches.
But it’s worth listening to his warnings — not because they induce more numbing paralysis but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That’s why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. Mowatt-Larssen doesn’t want to anguish later that he didn’t sound the alarm in time.
Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after Sept. 11, when then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to create a new branch on weapons of mass destruction in the agency’s counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare the chapter on al-Qaeda’s nuclear efforts that appears in Tenet’s memoir, ” At the Center of the Storm.” Now that the uproar over Tenet’s mistaken “slam dunk” assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it’s worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda’s nuclear ambitions.
Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: “Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so.”
Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capabilities. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his haven in Afghanistan.
Al-Qaeda proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet saying that “al-Qaeda has the right to kill 4 million Americans” in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaeda were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels.” Interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaeda didn’t yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.
Most chilling of all was Zawahiri’s decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because “we have something better in mind.” What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don’t know.
After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. Many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda doesn’t have nuclear capability today. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don’t know.
So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it was carried out? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?
A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.
Full WaPo Op-Ed By David Ignatius HERE.
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I am going on the record … I will vote for any fool who has the balls to nuke the entire Middle East if they nuke a single US target.
October 18th, 2007 at 8:37 amI’d say Wretchard wrote the definitive essay on what to do
October 18th, 2007 at 9:04 amif we get nuked by islamists, over at The Belmont Club
it was called The Three Conjectures.
It’s a good read:
http://belmontclub.blogspot.com/2003/09/three-conjectures-pew-poll-finds-40-of.html
See what you think.
Dave,
He comes to the same conclusions. Although, I believe that we should counter before Islam wipes us and itself out. I would prefer we wipe them out and be done with it. Some say that would be genocide but I view it more of ridding the world of a cancer the same way we rid a body of cancer … radiation.
October 18th, 2007 at 9:32 am“See what you think.”
Apparently some folks find it useful to intellectualize in an historical context over the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists. That may be because they are inclined to ponder what could, should or would happen rather than what is happening which, to me, is not enough. That cat thinks the Islamists give a fuck whether use of WMD brings about the destruction of everyone including themselves? They look forward to it.
*A* nuclear device of any sort going off anywhere in this country other than the Nevada desert would be immensely devastating. In every way; politically, economically and socially.
He did say one useful thing:
“The greatest threat to Muslims is radical Islam; and the greatest threat of all is a radical Islam armed with weapons of mass destruction.”
I will give him allowance for the fact that his essay and the poll it cites are dated 2003. However, since then the “threat to Muslims” has spread vociferously to the rest of the world. Saying that is the fault of the ‘War in Iraq’ is to woefully underestimate the enemy, radical Islam. It is a virus that 60 years of ‘talk’ has not contained and until it is contained I, for one, do not give a fuck about anything on the lib agenda like climate change, Armenian genocide, Charlie Rangel naming a library after himself (fuck him), etc. etc..
October 18th, 2007 at 10:19 amDave M: “The 3 Conjectures” is an eye-opener!
October 18th, 2007 at 10:54 amWe know they will do it as soon as they are able, so the rational American response is to wipe the fuckers out before they can do it.
I don’t give a damn if some want to call it genocide, as long as I am around to hear it called something. The alternative in this situation is suicide.
Dave’s recommended blog at The Belmont Club is very clearly thought out. Take the time to read it.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:37 amI read the essay. Maybe I missed the part where it tells us “what to do if we get nuked by islamists”.
October 18th, 2007 at 11:59 amSully;
October 18th, 2007 at 12:55 pmreread. The options depend on whether it was a one-time lucky shot, or a state-based repeatable event. For #2, the options are basically to walk up the escalation ladder till a final 1,000,000,000 killer strike on Islamic states, or go to that immediately and forego the 70,000,000 or so US deaths that gradual escalation permits.
Bush Doctrine: Pre-emptive military action. Nuke ‘em now!
October 18th, 2007 at 1:21 pm“Sully;
reread.”
Um…OK.
October 18th, 2007 at 1:29 pmI did.
Neither of his “options” are viable.
There is nothing ‘optional’ about “lucky shot” terrorists, state-based or otherwise, gaining nuclear capability; so what purpose is served by pondering what we might do if we were attacked in that manner?
This is why Israel attacks *before* that capability is ever realized and we should do the same.
Like I said, you can intellectualize over the impact an attack of that nature might have if that gets your rocks off but an attack of that nature and subsequent retaliation (a given) is not an “option”.
The dude said “see what you think”. Well I think it’s just a word salad about something that can never be allowed to happen.
Dave M ..
His point as I saw it is that
1) our nuclear deterrent in effect was useless toward a nuclear AQ
2) the Muslim society would be blind to their own destruction if they did obtain nuclear capability…and in effect with our war effort we were doing them a favor that they would never realize..
3).. as he says as of 2003, “That effort really consists of two separate aspects: a campaign to destroy the locus of militant Islam and prevent their acquisition of WMDs”
October 18th, 2007 at 4:20 pmwhat the hell sully? I live in the Nevada desert!:grin:
October 20th, 2007 at 4:39 pm