When al-Qaeda's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, called off a planned chemical attack on New York's subway system in 2003, he offered a chilling explanation: The plot to unleash poison gas on New Yorkers was being dropped for "something better," Zawahiri said in a message intercepted by U.S. eavesdroppers.
The meaning of Zawahiri's cryptic threat remains unclear more than six years later, but a new report warns that al-Qaeda has not abandoned its goal of attacking the United States with a chemical, biological or even nuclear weapon.
The report, by a former senior CIA official who led the agency's hunt for weapons of mass destruction, portrays al-Qaeda's leaders as determined and patient, willing to wait for years to acquire the kind of weapons that could inflict widespread casualties.
The former official, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, draws on his knowledge of classified case files to argue that al-Qaeda has been far more sophisticated in its pursuit of weapons of mass destruction than is commonly believed, pursuing parallel paths to acquiring weapons and forging alliances with groups that can offer resources and expertise.
"If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants had been interested in . . . small-scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so now," Mowatt-Larssen writes in a report released Monday by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Update
This just in... Apparently, we're ill-prepared to do anything about it if they do hit us with any WMD.
A commission set up to assess national security measures on Tuesday gave the U.S. government a failing grade in improving response time to a biological attack.
"Nearly a decade after September 11, 2001, one year after our original report, and one month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the United States is failing to address several urgent threats, especially bioterrorism," said former Sen. Bob Graham, chairman of the commission.
"Each of the last three administrations has been slow to recognize and respond to the biothreat. But we no longer have the luxury of a slow learning curve, when we know al Qaeda is interested in bioweapons," Graham said.
"The assessment is not a good one, particularly in the area of biological threats," the report by the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism said.
By: Brant
I said no, but it sort of depends on how you want to define "WMD". I could see them doing some kind of small-scale chemical attack on a vulnerable spot like a subway, or at a stretch even detonating a few drums of toxic waste or rad waste to scatter it around and contaminate a small area. But I don't see suitcase nukes or any kind of mass deaths.
ReplyDeleteThat kind of thing is immaterial anyway, what terrorists need to do is sow panic - and you could do that nowadays just by dropping a CS grenade or even a homemade stink bomb in the subway.
I think you're right about sowing panic, but I think at some point they need a successful attack to maintain credibility. Even a few dozen CS grenades in the subway would do it, and it wouldn't take much to make that happen. You could get a few cans of commercially-available mace or pepper spray and put a timer on them and leave them on a platform and blow it.
ReplyDelete