Posted on 04/29/2003 11:54:01 AM PDT by knighthawk
Fears grow that extremists are ready to cross another threshold of terror
Evidence gathered in Iraq and Afghanistan lends credence to claims that radical Islamic groups are dabbling in lethal toxins
BEIRUT: A few days ago, Japanese prosecutors demanded the death sentence for the guru of the Aum Shinrikyo (Supreme Truth) doomsday cult, Shoko Asahara, for masterminding the sarin gas attack on Tokyo’s subway system on March 20, 1995. Twelve people were killed and 2,500 sickened. A year earlier, sect activists had released sarin in a residential neighborhood in the Nagano Mountains, killing seven people. Those atrocities crossed a moral threshold in the annals of terrorism, with attackers using biological weapons on a mass scale against civilians for the first time, seeking to cause as many casualties as possible.
Osama bin Laden’s suicide squads crossed another such threshold on Sept. 11, 2001, when they turned hijacked US airliners, their fuel tanks still full, into guided missiles and crashed them into buildings symbolizing US power to kill some 3,000 people in the flick of an eye.
They succeeded in doing what Aum Shrinkyo tried to do slaughter on a horrifying scale. Now, US counter-terrorism specialists say, the long-feared threat that Al-Qaeda or its associated groups of Islamic extremists will carry out a biological warfare attack on a similar scale may be getting closer. US forces in northwestern Iraq say they have uncovered evidence that Islamic terrorists, supposedly linked to Al-Qaeda, had dabbled in the black art of manufacturing poison.
If these reports are true, then there is cause for concern. It must be said that when it comes to US claims about the weapons of mass destruction allegedly held by Saddam Hussein, there must be an element of doubt since so far, at least, no hard evidence to substantiate such claims has been uncovered.
Still, the recent discovery in London and Paris of small amounts of what were thought to be ricin, a lethal toxin that is one of the most deadly of natural poisons, along with US intelligence warnings that discoveries in Afghanistan have shown that Al-Qaeda’s biological warfare efforts are more advanced than previously thought, has sharpened concerns that Islamic extremists may be planning to strike to avenge the US-led invasion of Iraq.
These developments have intensified the hunt for one of the key figures behind this threat, a one-legged Jordanian known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, whose real name is believed to be Ahmed Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh.
He heads a small organization called Al-Tawhid which appears to have cells operating across Western Europe and in parts of the Middle East, including Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.
The effort to prevent such a chemical or biological attack has been given added urgency by the fact that, so far at least, the terrorist campaign some had expected when US and British forces invaded Iraq on March 20 has not materialized. There have been isolated incidents across the globe, but nothing significant in terms of attacks on Western civilian targets. However, with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, serious terrorist attacks could yet be unleashed.
Another reason why there is growing concern in the West about chemical/biological attacks is that none has been carried out by Al-Qaeda or any other organization since the threat of international Islamic extremism emerged five years ago. The assumption by Western security authorities is that such ground-breaking operations, inflicting the heaviest possible casualties and the maximum panic, are major objectives of terrorist planners “shock and awe” in reverse to maintain their credibility for innovation, ruthlessness and ability to penetrate the most sophisticated defenses.
On April 2, the Federal Bureau of Investigation urged US law enforcement agencies to watch out for clandestine laboratories capable of concocting chemical and biological agents, including highly infectious bacteria and toxins like ricin, using commonly available materials. The agency warned in its weekly bulletin, which goes to 18,000 law enforcement agencies around the US, that the March 1 capture in Pakistan of Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, Al-Qaeda’s operations chief, had provided fresh evidence that Osama bin Laden’s network was still experimenting with chemical and biological weapons.
Concern was underlined on April 11 when the US Army’s biodefense center at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah was reported to have reproduced the anthrax powder used in deadly postal attacks in America September-October 2001 and concluded that it was made with inexpensive equipment no more than a few thousand dollars and limited expertise. These findings reinforced a theory among FBI investigators that the anthrax had probably been made by renegade scientists and not under a military program such as Iraq conducted.
Still, as coalition forces in Iraq searched high and low for concrete evidence of Iraq’s clandestine weapons programs, US Marines seized a high-security complex at Salman Pak, southeast of Baghdad, on April 5. It had been used as a training base for Iraqi Special Forces, as well as the Fedayeen Saddam, diehard followers of Saddam Hussein who fought coalition forces tenaciously, and non-Iraqi terrorist groups. According to US officials, it also housed a biological warfare center where dozens of scientists and technicians had worked on ways to deliver ricin, anthrax and other deadly substances. No bioweapons were actually found, however.
Ricin is produced from castor beans and, experts say, is relatively easy to make and stockpile. It has no known antidote. White supremacist groups in the US are believed to maintain stocks. It has been used sparingly so far, primarily to assassinate individuals, such as Bulgarian dissident Georgi Markov who was fatally stabbed with a poison-tipped umbrella at a London bus stop in 1978 by the Bulgarian secret service. To use it as a weapon of mass destruction would require hundreds of liters that could be spread by aerosols.
And just to emphasize the growing market for these nightmarish weapons, The Washington Post reported earlier this month that biological weapons material developed by South Africa during the apartheid era remained in private hands and was attracting foreigners seeking to acquire it. It said that Daan Goosen, a South African scientist who ran a biological weapons laboratory under Project Coast, a secret biological and chemical warfare project under the white minority government admitted trying to peddle his ghoulish products cigarettes laced with anthrax, chocolates impregnated with toxins such as botulism and salmonella, clothes dusted with poisons that could be absorbed through the skin to the US for $5 million.
Goosen denied the report, but said prospective buyers from other countries, including at least one unidentified Arab country, had sought to buy bacteria and organisms like anthrax in South Africa.
Zarqawi, 36, is considered something of an expert on chemical and biological weapons, including ricin, following training he is purported to have undergone in Afghanistan under the aegis of Al-Qaeda in the 1990s. He has also been linked to an abortive plot to use ricin to poison food at a British military base and other allied military facilities across Europe.
In February, US Secretary of State Colin Powell, among other senior administration figures, sought to link Zarqawi with Saddam Hussein’s regime because he got medical treatment in Baghdad in October 2001 after he was wounded in a US strike in Afghanistan. One of his legs was amputated and he now uses an artificial limb, but that does not seem to have impeded his operations.
People like Zarqawi didn’t just wander into Baghdad for such treatment; those who did went there undoubtedly with the approval of Iraq’s security apparatus. However, that is not conclusive proof of an operational link between organizations like Al-Qaeda or Al-Tawhid with Iraqi intelligence.
US and European intelligence agencies did not go along with the Bush administration’s conclusions, seen in many quarters as a desperate attempt to tie Saddam Hussein in with bin Laden to buttress Bush’s widely questioned motivation for going after Saddam. These agencies consider Zarqawi to be an associate of bin Laden’s rather than one of his lieutenants, someone sympathetic to the objectives of Al-Qaeda but not controlled by it.
However, Western and Arab intelligence services believe Zarqawi has only the most tenuous organizational links to Al-Qaeda, operating, like many other Islamic cells, independently against the West.
Zarqawi has only come to figure in the shadowy world of Islamic terrorism in recent months. He was not mentioned in the US most-wanted lists following Sept. 11 or in the pantheon of Al-Qaeda’s senior commanders. His sudden elevation to most-dangerous category is partly due to the growing intelligence war being waged against Islamic militants and partly because the Americans believed they could link him with Saddam. Certainly Powell’s allegations surprised the Germans, whose intelligence services had been investigating Zarqawi for a year before the Americans became aware of the extent of his activities.
Zarqawi, who was born in the Zarqa region of Jordan, went to Afghanistan as a teenager in the late 1980s to join the jihad against the invading Soviets. He met bin Laden there and when he returned to Jordan in 1992 he established his own Islamic cells. In 1999, one group he had set up to carry out attacks against Westerners and Israelis during the Millennium was rounded up by security authorities.
Zarqawi escaped and returned to Afghanistan, where he continued his work on chemical and biological weapons. Jordan’s state security court sentenced him in absentia to 15 years’ imprisonment with hard labor. He turned up later in western Afghanistan where he was in charge of a guerrilla training camp near Herat.
In December 2002, Jordanian authorities identified Zarqawi as having orchestrated the assassination in Amman of US aid official Laurence Foley on Oct. 28. Islamic militants linked to Zarqawi and Al-Tawhid have been arrested in Britain, Germany and Spain in recent months.
US Special Forces in Iraq said last week they had found biowar manuals similar to documentation found at Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan in 2001, at a mountain camp abandoned by Ansar al-Islam, a fundamentalist group that was based in northwestern Iraq near the Iranian border and attacked by the Americans. They also reported finding a laboratory where ricin and cyanide were made. The Americans have linked Ansar to Al-Qaeda and Zarqawi.
Although proof of his presence was not found, wiretaps and telephone records from suspected terrorists seized in Italy show five people believed to be Zarqawi’s associates in northern Iraq were in contact by satellite telephone with associates in Europe.
-All Terror, All the Time-- FR's links to NBC Warfare, Terror, and More...--
These developments have intensified the hunt for one of the key figures behind this threat, a one-legged Jordanian known as Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, whose real name is believed to be Ahmed Fadil Nazal al-Khalayleh.
He heads a small organization called Al-Tawhid which appears to have cells operating across Western Europe and in parts of the Middle East, including Jordan, Lebanon and Iraq.
The effort to prevent such a chemical or biological attack has been given added urgency by the fact that, so far at least, the terrorist campaign some had expected when US and British forces invaded Iraq on March 20 has not materialized. There have been isolated incidents across the globe, but nothing significant in terms of attacks on Western civilian targets. However, with the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s regime, serious terrorist attacks could yet be unleashed.
Another reason why there is growing concern in the West about chemical/biological attacks is that none has been carried out by Al-Qaeda or any other organization since the threat of international Islamic extremism emerged five years ago. The assumption by Western security authorities is that such ground-breaking operations, inflicting the heaviest possible casualties and the maximum panic, are major objectives of terrorist planners ú “shock and awe” in reverse to maintain their credibility for innovation, ruthlessness and ability to penetrate the most sophisticated defenses."
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.