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Osama bin Laden’s Mandate for Nuclear Terror

Al Qaeda Leader Received Religious Justification to Use Weapons of Mass Destruction

An Islamic religious ruling that had been kept from the public for a year-and-a-half granted Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders permission to use nuclear, biological or chemical weapons against the United States and its allies. The existence of the ruling, or fatwa, was revealed by Michael Scheuer, a former Central Intelligence Agency officer who headed the agency’s Bin Laden unit from 1996 to 1999 during the course of a November 14 broadcast of the CBS news show Sixty Minutes.

The fatwa was issued by a prominent Saudi cleric on May 21, 2003, and is an ominous sign that bin Laden and al Qaeda no longer accept moral or religious values obstructing the use of weapons of mass destruction.

After the September 11 attacks, bin Laden was criticized by many Muslim clerics for attacking the United States without adequate warning. Scheuer, the author, as “Anonymous,” of the recent book Imperial Hubris: How the West is Losing the War on Terror, said bin Laden may now believe he is immune to similar criticism if a similar attack were launched against the U.S. with weapons of mass destruction.

Michael Scheuer CBS PhotoFatwas have been used several times in recent years as justification for anti-Western fervor and terrorist acts including several issued in the late 1990s in defense of Palestinian suicide bombers. These rulings actually served to support the English term ‘homicide bomber’ as the fatwas declared that such an attack was not, in fact, suicide but a “holy” act. Osama bin Laden himself issued a notorious 1998 fatwa on “Urging Jihad Against Americans.” According to Mohammad Faghfoory, a professor of Islam at The George Washington University, Osama bin Laden does not have the mainstream religious authority to issue legitimate fatwas despite his popular appeal. As bin Laden himself is not a religious authority, he has depended on Muslim clerics supportive of his terrorist methods. By providing this legitimacy, these fatwas play an important strategic role for bin Laden and his movement.

Sheik Nasir bin Hamid al Fahd, the cleric who granted the decree concerning WMD, is part of an ultra-conservative trio of Saudi religious leaders that has been relentlessly criticized by the Saudi government for inciting terrorist fervor and supporting terrorist organizations. According to a London-based, Saudi-owned newspaper, Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, al Fahd, and his two colleagues, Ali al-Khudayr and Ahmad al-Khaladi, are part of what is known as the “Salafi Jihadi” trend. This movement is part of the recent emergence of a self-proclaimed “utterly pure Islamic model” that began to appear in the late 1990s, at the same time the Taliban regime emerged in Afghanistan. The Salafi School was formed in order to reply “to any criticism of the Taliban’s measures that did not enjoy the approval of prominent scholars of the Islamic world.” The movement simply served to justify any actions condemned by mainstream Islam. To them, the Taliban regime was the most legitimate representative of Islam and anyone who joins the cause of fighting international terrorism, i.e. dismantling Al Qaeda and the Taliban, is an “infidel”.

Al-Arabiya TV station aired a statement 7/29/03 from an Iraqi group calling themselves the Salafi (Fundamentalist) Jihadi Group. The group warned that its members would fight against America. In addition to the fatwa discussed recently by Scheuer, the “Three Takfir Sheikhs”, as they are known in the Arab press, meaning that they accuse others of being infidels, have published several other inflammatory edicts. According to Peter Valenti of the World Press Review, in his January 15, 2004 article, “Renovating the House of Saud”, their numerous decrees have “sanctioned arm resistance against the government”. In a tripartite fatwa released to coincide with a Saudi government hunt for 19 suspected terrorists, the Takfir Sheikhs claimed that “it is categorically forbidden to let down these mujahidin [freedom fighters] - the 19 wanted persons- to stand against them, defame, help those working against them, or report them.” According to Al-Sharq Al-Awsat, al Fahd is also extremely radical in his other writings. In “The Truth About Civilization”, al Fahd claimed that “there was no reason to be proud of all the achievements made by Muslim scientists in chemistry, medicine, and mathematics, because they were deviants and heretics.”

The Saudi government stepped up security and anti-terrorism operations across Saudi Arabia after September 11. All three sheiks were arrested in Mecca in June 2003 after their fatwas were connected to several acts of terrorism and anti-government activity in the country. Sheikh al Fahd is the specific cleric who granted Osama bin Laden and other terrorists carte blanche permission to use weapons of mass destruction. The 25-page document, translated into English as “A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction against Infidels” (Risalah fi hukm istikhdam aslihat al-damar al-shamel didh al-kuffar), published on May 21, 2003, resolves several specific moral dilemmas involving the use of WMDs including “the permissibility of attacking the polytheists by night, even if their children are injured” and “that these weapons will kill some Muslims”. Al Fahd meticulously solved these dilemmas, and many others, with his own interpretations of the Qu’ran, the sayings and deeds of the Prophet Mohammed and his companions and the rulings of past Islamic scholars, in order to eliminate any doubt towards the moral justification, and even the moral necessity, of utilizing weapons of mass destruction in the fight against the United States.

Osama bin Laden.First, al Fahd denied that international law, which strongly condemns the use of WMD, should be taken into consideration. Islamic law, in al Fahd’s view and other Islamic extremists, overrides any man-made laws. To the question of whether a nuclear attack would defy the Islamic tenet “that the basic rule in killing is to do it in a good manner”, al Fahd argued that this rule has exceptions in that “one kills in a good manner only when one can”. Following the radical cleric’s logic, it is permissible in certain circumstances to kill women, children, and fellow Muslims in pursuit of waging jihad.

These arguments aside, the basis of al Fahd’s case for weapons of mass destruction seem to be a perversion of the biblical tenet “eye for an eye”. According to al Fahd, an attack against the United States “is permissible merely on the basis of the rule of treating as one has been treated. No other arguments need be mentioned.” He has not described which actions would warrsant such a response, mentioning only “recent events” in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Al Fahd justified the mass casualties and destruction that would be expected to result from an attack of this nature. He wrote in the fatwa that “some brothers” have provided an estimate of the number of Muslims killed by American weapons to total almost ten million; therefore, an attack against America that would take an equal amount of lives is permissible. In his own words, “if a bomb that killed ten million of them and burned as much of their land as they have burned Muslims’ land were dropped on them, it would be permissible, with no need to mention any other argument. We might need other arguments if we wanted to annihilate more than this number of them.”

Al Fahd was criticized by Dr. Ayid al Qarni, a respected cleric and preacher, when both appeared on Saudi national television on November 22, 2003, according to a BBC news report the next day. In response to his colleagues criticism, and because of his self-proclaimed “shock” after the May 12, 2003 terrorist bombing in the Saudi capital of Riyadh that ripped through a large apartment complex, killing 23 people, including nine Americans, al Fahd contradicted many of the statements he made in his earlier fatwas, including the one concerning WMDs.

Al Fahd told television viewers that he “demanded that this interview be conducted to acquit myself of such actions and so that people will know that we do not approve of such acts, which are prohibited.” When asked by al Qarni whether he regretted issuing any of his previous fatwas, al Fahd stated that “yes, there are many fatwas...which contained unbridled enthusiasm, generalizations and mistakes.” However, many Saudis question the sincerity of his statements, as al Fahd was still in prison when he first began to retract his previous fatwas. It is largely acknowledged that the intelligence community believes that Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorist leaders have a strong desire to obtain weapons of mass destruction for attacks against the United States and others. Traditionally, terrorist groups have been more focused on garnering attention for their “cause” and less on mass killings.

A 1999 GAO report noted that the CIA “estimates that terrorist interest in WMD is growing, as is the number of potential perpetrators.” Furthermore, it was revealed in a 1998 grand jury investigation relating to the African embassy bombings that bin Laden “was seeking nuclear weapons and materials, as well as chemical agents.” Some question whether al Qaeda has the ability to acquire such resources and technology, while many are confident that they both can, and have.

A Congressional Research Service report released in 1999, “the key obstacle to building such a weapon is the availability of a sufficient quantity of fissile material - either plutonium or highly enriched uranium.” It has been widely reported that highly enriched uranium (HEU) is the material of choice when building a nuclear weapon because it is easier to handle and safer than plutonium. There are hundreds of tons of HEU around the world including large stockpiles in Russia. The amount needed for a basic device is about 100 pounds, enough to fit into eight soda cans.

Osama bin Laden’s pursuit of HEU from Africa, Europe, and Russia was revealed in the February 2001 testimony of former al Qaeda member Jamal Ahmad Al-Fadl in the trial United States v. Osama bin Laden et al., for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa.

The specter of “loose nukes”, nuclear weapons materials and technology that have been leaked from the former Soviet Union, potentially ending up in terrorist hands. Scheuer himself, during a November 2004 press event, claimed that al Qaeda decided that procuring the plutonium and technology necessary to build a nuclear weapon had proven to be too difficult, “so they’re after a kind of off-the shelf device, if they could find one.” The former Soviet Union would be the most likely place to find such a device. It is an extremely foreboding development that the moral and religious backing to use these weapons serves to overcome yet one more obstacle that stands in the way of a devastating attack.

Although it appears al Fahd may, at least publicly, be backing away from his support of such acts, it is unknown whether bin Laden will also reconsider their moral legitimacy, or if al Fahd’s retraction will have any effect on reducing terrorist acts. Scheuer is skeptical that it would help to reduce attacks, as the vast majority of people in Saudi Arabia and the Arab world tend to believe that the cleric was forced by the Saudi government to make the statement.

The Arab public sees al Fahd’s retraction, Scheuer explained, to be part of the “typical Saudi shell-game”. There is also the sense that these fatwas are a symptom, rather than a cause, of terrorist sentiment. As Muhammad al Mahfuz, a prominent writer on Islamic affairs, stated in a November 24, 2003 article in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, the sheikh’s “step is not enough. The reason for (the fatwa) remains.”