[nw_arizona_granny]

Why are we chasing WMD's today?

They seem to leap off the page at me.

If you want to dig into old reports, the link at 3760, will take you to reports that stop in 2004 for some reason, there are several years of them in the archives.

I happened to land there in 1999 and look at what I found for one page, imagine what else is lurking there.

I have a theory, that in 1999, they were attempting to get the info out to the world and clinton was doing nothing worth while about it.

There is lots of proof out there that the terrorists have anything that they want to use on the world.

[DAVEY CROCKETT]

I don't know how I got on WMD, but here is more. Why didn't I ever think of Pakistan? I should of had a V-8...LOL

Preventing a Nightmare Scenario: Terrorist Attacks Using Russian Nuclear Weapons and Materials
by Ariel Cohen, Ph.D.
Backgrounder #1854

May 20, 2005
snip...

Radical Islam’s “Religious Duty”

Osama bin Laden has called using weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. a “religious duty.” He has also declared that undermining America’s economic power is his strategic objective. Bin Laden did not confirm or deny pursuit of such weapons in press interviews, but a body of evi­dence indicates that he has actively sought them.

For example, Ahmad al Fadl, a defector from al-Qaeda, testified in U.S. court that in 1994 he was tasked with procuring a radioactive material, appar­ently highly enriched uranium (HEU), from a South African source.[1] Ayman al-Zawahiri was spotted vis­iting Russia for six months in 1996—ostensibly to assist the Chechens to escalate their hostilities against Russia—and spoke publicly about the ease of procuring nuclear materials from the former Soviet republics. In 2002, Abu Zubaydah told inter­rogators that al-Qaeda knew how to build “dirty bombs” and where to get material for them.[2]

There are also media reports of al-Qaeda buying or stealing up to 20 nuclear warheads from the former Soviet republics, bin Laden providing $3 million and large commercial amounts of opium to Chechens in exchange for nuclear weapons or material, and four Turkmen nuclear scientists working to create an al-Qaeda weapon.[3] The verac­ity of these reports cannot be independently evalu­ated.[4] In February 2005, Director of Central Intelligence Porter Goss testified that al-Qaeda might possess radioactive material of Russian or Soviet origin.

In 2003, Sheikh Nasir bin Hamid al-Fahd, a prominent Saudi cleric close to al-Qaeda, provided a comprehensive religious opinion (fatwa) justify­ing the use of nuclear weapons against the United States, even it killed up to 10 million Americans, under the pretext that the United States is to blame for the deaths of 10 million Muslims.[5] This cleric and two of his colleagues—Ali al-Khudayr and Ahmad al-Khaladi—have provided “religious” jus­tifications for bin Laden to create mayhem. Bin Laden portrays himself as a pious Muslim who pro­tects and defends other Muslims and wages a jihad (holy war) in their name.[6]

Al-Qaeda is an organization that is religiously and ideologically committed to the destruction of the United States and Israel, the subjugation of the West, and the overthrow of existing Muslim and Arab regimes throughout the greater Middle East and beyond—from Nigeria to Saudi Arabia to Indonesia. Its proclaimed goal is establishment of a caliphate (khilafa)—a militarized dictatorship based on the Shari’a (holy law) and dedicated to conquest of the non-Muslim world (Dar al-Harb, literally “Land of the Sword”).

Other radical Islamist organizations share these far-reaching goals and anti-American agendas, including the Lebanese Shi’a Hezballah and Paki­stani Lashkar-e-Tayyiba. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba has links to al-Qaeda, technological sophistication and personnel, and international connections reaching into the U.S. that could help them acquire WMD capabilities.[7] For example:

Hezballah operates Al-Manar, a satellite TV channel, and recently tested a military unmanned aerial vehicle, which flew over Israel. Such low-flying vehicles can deliver war­heads to targets otherwise protected against air attacks.
Hamas, another radical Islamist terrorist orga­nization, succeeded in developing rockets and producing Kassam short-range missiles in the technologically primitive conditions of Gaza’s metal workshops and garages.
Other Palestinian radical organizations have uti­lized hot air balloons and hang gliders, which can be used to deliver a crude bomb or radiation dispersion device (RDD or “dirty bomb”).[8]
All of these organizations attract a number of engineers and technicians who could facilitate their homegrown nuclear weapons programs. With con­siderable financial resources at their disposal, they can also recruit engineers and scientists from the thousands who have received education in related fields in Russia, the West, and the Muslim world. Such clandestine programs would be assisted by the wealth of information about nuclear matters available on the Internet.

Furthermore, radical Islamists have ideological, organizational, and operational connections to the military and intelligence establishments of Iran and Pakistan. Iran is suspected by both the Bush Administration and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of managing a clandestine nuclear weapons program. Pakistan is a nuclear power, and anti-American Islamists strongly influ­ence its nuclear establishment and military and intelligence services.

For example, Pakistan was the source of Ahmed Qadir Khan’s global nuclear proliferation network, which supplied technology to North Korea, Libya, Iran, and possibly other countries.[9] And there is strong suspicion that prior to 9/11, Sultan Bashir-ud-Din Mehmood and Abdul Majid, two senior nuclear scientists from Pakistan who used to work for Khan, traveled to Afghanistan to offer their expertise to Osama bin Laden.[10]

Experts believe that terrorists are willing to inflict massive casualties using WMD, capable of doing so despite the technical difficulties of execut­ing such an attack, and capable of either stealing or building a nuclear bomb. The IAEA has docu­mented cases of HEU theft.[11]

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:gI-Rg2BKJz0J:www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/bg1854.cfm+Russian+Organized+Crime+Linked+to+Osama+bin+Laden.%22+&hl=en