Bin Laden's nuclear threat

OSAMA BIN LADEN and his al-Qaeda network have acquired nuclear materials for possible use in their terrorism war against the West, intelligence sources have disclosed.

The Western sources say that the suspected mastermind of the September 11 attacks on America does not have the capability to mount a nuclear attack but fear he would do so if he could.

They believe that he obtained the materials illegally from Pakistan, which has a nuclear capability.

The knowledge that bin Laden has components for a nuclear weapons device in his arsenal is believed to lie behind the regular warnings from President Bush and Tony Blair that he would commit worse atrocities than the suicide assaults on New York and Washington if he were able to.

They may also explain the speed with which the decision was taken to go after bin Laden and his terrorist network, even if that meant toppling the Taleban regime in Afghanistan first.

The disclosure comes as MPs prepare to learn today the details of British troops earmarked for deployment to Afghanistan. They will include a commando group of about 1,000 Royal Marines, currently on exercise in Oman, as well as a large contingent of special forces and specialist support units. The force will be based on ships that have also been participating in the huge tri-Service exercise. They are expected to include the aircraft carrier HMS Illustrious, stripped of her Harrier jets so she can be used as a platform for helicopters, or HMS Ocean, a dedicated helicopter carrier, two anti-aircraft destroyers to protect the carrier, the assault ship HMS Fearless, and two Royal Fleet Auxiliary support vessels.

Yesterday Mr Blair sought to reassure Muslim leaders that the military action in Afghanistan should be over as quickly as possible. He told the Islamic Response to Terrorism Conference in North London: “I hope you understand that what is important is that we make sure at the same time we take the action necessary now in order to hold to account those who committed the actions of September 11.”

There has been clear evidence for several years that bin Laden’s agents have been trying to buy, steal or smuggle nuclear systems in order to attack the West. He has said that it was his “religious duty” to seek to acquire chemical, biological and nuclear weapons of mass destruction.

An informed source has told The Times that bin Laden appeared to have amassed a “terrifying” range of weapons although he was insistent that he did not have the capacity to launch a nuclear attack. Intelligence sources, however, have voiced concerns about bin Laden obtaining radioactive material for a “dirty bomb”. Rather than being used in an atomic weapon, the material would be dispersed in a way that would seriously contaminate a small area. In an urban environment hundreds of people could die and thousands more be exposed to radiation poisoning.

In 1993 a senior bin Laden operative, Jamal al-Fadi, met a Sudanese military commander in Khartoum to try to negotiate the sale of a cylinder of enriched South African uranium for a black market price of $1.5 million (£1.2 million). A separate al-Qaeda attempt to buy weapons-grade nuclear material through the Russian mafia was foiled in Prague when several kilograms of highly enriched uranium were seized, according to a German TV report last week.

Earlier this week two former government nuclear scientists in Pakistan were detained amid fears about their links with the Taleban. Bashir uddin Mahmood was project director in Pakistan’s nuclear programme before its 1998 tests. Since retiring from the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission three years ago, he ran a group which carried out relief work in Afghanistan, and was known to be supportive of the Taleban. Chaudry Abdul Majid was a director of the commission in 1999.

Intelligence officials have long been aware of the potential for contraband uranium to be turned into an atomic “suitcase bomb”. An easier outcome is a radiological weapon — a conventional weapon with a radioactive core — which has the ability to contaminate large areas.

George Tenet, Director of the CIA, told the Senate Intelligence Committee last year that bin Laden was trying to obtain nuclear materials.

According to a book about the terrorist leader, The Man Who Declared War on America, Chechen rebels facilitated the sale of nuclear suitcase bombs in the late 1990s from a range of former Soviet republics including Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Russia.

Quoting Russian and Arab intelligence sources, the author, Yossef Bodansky, says that bin Laden’s go-betweens paid the Chechens $30 million in cash and gave them two tonnes of heroin with a Western street value of up to $700 million for a number of bombs.

In 1998 bin Laden issued a statement entitled “The Nuclear Bomb of Islam”, which said: “It is the duty of Muslims to prepare as much force as possible to terrorise the enemies of God.”

The correct response is a countdown.

This is the most critical news of our time, perhaps in the history of the world. The Times of London is one of the oldest and most respected newspapers in the world. The story is undoubtedly true. It required the concurrence and fact checking of some very staid editors to print it. It was probably quietly released to the Times by the Ministry of Defense to prepare the British people for what lies ahead.

The bottom line is that for the first time in the history if the world, there is a madman lose with the capability of destroying the entire Western world. I served two tours in Vietnam and I am now more scared for my children and my country than I ever was in 24 months of LRRPs.

This is not the time for quips or smart answers from FReepers, myself included. This is a time of challenge for the entire world.

Bin Laden would not have acquired nuclear materials if he did not intend to use them. The science and technology necessary to make a nuclear bomb is well known. Russian physicians make $90 a month. Does anyone doubt Bin Laden could hire Russian scientists to build him a few bombs, for say, $10,000 a month? The difficult part is acquiring the fissionable materiel and now Bin Laden has done that.

We as a nation have the most difficult choice ever faced by a people. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were cities that were part of an Empire. Now, not just cities are threatened, but 2/3 of the world. In order to prevent the destruction of the entire Western world, we must probably destroy part of another world. Can anyone guarantee that any other course than extinction will stop Bin Laden?

Afghanistan, Iraq and the other countries that support terrorists must cease to exist. They have lost their right to exist by their failure to stop the Islamic psychotics who would now kill all of us. Limited nuc strikes against his hq infrastructure might do it, but we must be prepared to continue until we are absolutely sure the entire cancer is removed. Just like surgery, sometimes you must take a limb to save a life.

Think of it this way. Bin Laden wants to kill your children because they are "infidels." He now has the capability to do so. What should we do to stop him from killing your children? Does anything other than total destruction guarantee he will be stopped?

Simply put, if we fail to stop them now, and I mean right now, we will lose our right to exist, and we will all probably die in Bin Laden's newly developed mushroom cloud.

It's very simple. It's war and it's them or us.... just like it is in any war.

Will it necessitate killing many people, probably millions? Yes. If we do not, how many millions will die when New York and Washington are vaporized, rather than just attacked with airliners.

How soon do we need to do this? How long will it be until Bin Laden is ready to kill all of us? Will there be an international outcry? Yes, but at least we will be alive to hear it.

Do I realize what I propose would be considered insanity two months ago. Yes, but these are insane times... and it's them or us.

Also according to the "UK Times:"

Apocalypse now?

BY GILES WHITTELL

Dozens of Russia's nuclear weapons are missing. There is clear evidence that Osama bin Laden's agents have been scouring the world to buy or steal such devices in order to attack the West. When Ahmed Salama Mabruk was arrested three years ago in Baku, in Azerbaijan, no one in the West could confirm what he claimed to know. Some still doubt him, but no one now dares to say that he was lying. Mabruk was personal assistant to Ayman Zawahiri, the bespectacled lieutenant to Osama bin Laden who is now thought to have masterminded the September attacks on New York and Washington.

When Azerbaijani security forces confiscated Mabruk’s laptop they were able to download from it a mine of information about the structure of the al-Qaeda network. He was extradited to Egypt and is now serving a 25-year sentence for planning terrorist activities there, but during his trial he had a chance to exchange a few words in his Cairo courtroom with Mohammed Salah, a reporter with the London-based Al-Hayat newspaper.

“I asked him if al-Qaeda had obtained nuclear weapons and he told me that both al-Qaeda and Islamic Jihad had done so with the help of several different countries,” says Salah. “He said that bin Laden had told his men not to use them except when ordered to.” Salah was sceptical at first. “But now,” he says, “I believe everything.”

Another story that is also suddenly credible comes from Jamal Ahmed al-Fadl, who travelled to Khartoum, the Sudan capital, in 1993, with $1.5 million (£1 million) and orders from bin Laden to buy South African weapons-grade uranium. He says he made contact with a Sudanese Army officer offering the fuel for sale in a 3ft steel cylinder. Al-Fadl was paid $10,000 for his efforts before being removed from the negotiations.

Three years later al-Fadl walked into an American embassy in Africa and turned himself in. He is now the FBI’s most valuable source on bin Laden, its al-Qaeda supergrass, with secret accommodation and a new identity as a member of the bureau’s Witness Protection Programme. He says he doesn’t know if the uranium deal went through.

The deeper you look into this information vacuum, which US taxpayers increasingly consider a poor return on their $30 billion-a-year investment in foreign intelligence, the more worrying it becomes. Bin Laden has said that it is his duty to seek weapons of mass destruction, and the International Atomic Energy Authority (IAEA) in Vienna has confirmed hundreds of instances of nuclear smuggling since the collapse of the Soviet Union. They litter the map of Eurasia and implicate a gallery of crooks.

According to an Afghan refugee from Mazar-i Sharif now living in London, an entire family fell ill when a smuggler buried a large quantity of what was believed to be uranium in their garden. “Some of them were paralysed from the waist down and all the vegetation in their garden died,” the refugee says. “The uranium probably came from Taliqan or Kunduz province, near the border.”

For most of the 1990s the international community persuaded itself that nuclear smuggling on a larger scale than this was easy to detect and probably not happening. Western leaders are now having to assume the reverse: that only the clowns got caught. “They are probably the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr Laurie Mylroie.

“If Russian organised-crime groups with good contacts and resources got involved in this, you might never hear about it,” says Gary Milhollin, of the Wisconsin Project, a Washington anti-proliferation think-tank. “You tend to pick up the amateurs, not the pros.” Before September 11 such talk might have been alarmist. Now it is a sane reminder of the most sobering reality of the post-Soviet world order. What was the world’s largest nuclear power, with between 15,000 and 40,000 nuclear weapons and enough fissile material for 40,000 more, has spent the past decade staggering under the pressure of rampant corruption and criminality with its nuclear stockpile ill-guarded, compared with America’s. And vulnerable, above all, to the thousands of scientists who built it, but now earn on average $50 a month. The result is what one of Washington’s more moderate non-proliferation experts calls “a nuclear K-Mart”.

A black market has existed since before the Soviet collapse for a wide range of lesser nuclear assets — from battlefield weapons to “suitcase nukes” built for Soviet special forces and low-grade radioactive material that could be packed with conventional explosives to make the most basic poor-man’s atom bomb.

In the worst scenario, impossible to rule out with no UN weapons inspectors left in Iraq, Saddam could already have acquired enough fissile material for a warhead and mounted it atop a Soviet-built Scud missile.

In the early 1990s the smugglers’ preferred routes led west out of Russia and Ukraine to Eastern Europe and Germany. In 1994, a German police sting at Frankfurt airport led to the arrest of a Colombian in transit from Moscow with a consignment of plutonium in his suitcase, and the smugglers’ focus shifted towards the Caucasus and Central Asia.

I have interviewed Chechens in Georgia’s spectacular Pankisi Gorge who walk unhindered over the high passes of the Caucasus in and out of their war-torn homeland when the snows allow. Not far to the east, customs checks on trains from southern Russia to Azerbaijan are entirely avoidable with bribes. In the high Pamirs you can drive for hours along Tajikistan’s border with the Vakhan Corridor in northeastern Afghanistan and see hardly a soul.

It is no surprise to learn from the IAEA that in September 1998 police arrested eight people in Turkey and seized 10lb of uranium 235, destination unknown; nor that two men were arrested trying to sell plutonium in the remote Kyrgyz border town of Kara Balta the following year; nor that 4lb of highly enriched uranium was found less than three months ago packed into a glass jar in neat discs the size of ice hockey pucks in an hotel room in the Georgian Black Sea port of Batumi.

The list is merely a sample of what is known. It does not include police and media reports based on personal testimony, such as one in the Arabic Al-Watan news magazine in early 1999 claiming that bin Laden had pulled off a huge deal for 20 Russian nuclear warheads obtained for him by the Chechen mafia in exchange for $30 million in cash and two tons of opium. It does not include the FBI’s ongoing operation against a Pakistani intelligence agent with close ties to bin Laden identified as Mohammed Abbas, who placed an order with an undercover US agent posing as an arms dealer for six nuclear switches and a quantity of plutonium after announcing over lunch in New York that he meant to “kill all Americans”.

None of this, at any rate, came as a surprise to the CIA. “Bin Laden has been trying to get his hands on enriched uranium for seven or eight years,” Robert Wolsey, the agency’s former director, told reporters a week after the September 11 attacks. Why, then, did the world’s only superpower not do more to stop him? It is a question that torments America, but answers are already emerging. On the one hand the US intelligence community was hamstrung by internal turf wars, bureaucratic regulation and limits on what it could do to protect Russia’s nuclear stockpile because of Russia’s security interests and the risk of losing its own agents — a scenario considered unacceptable in the “risk-averse” post-Cold War era. Even more seriously, the CIA appears to have relied too heavily on the assumption that bin Laden could not have nuclear weapons since building and maintaining them takes huge political will and the resources of a nation state.

Experts are now saying that this was a false assumption on several counts. The first dates from 1997, when General Aleksandr Lebed, then head of Russia’s national security council, dropped a bombshell by declaring that dozens, possibly hundreds, of suitcase-sized nuclear weapons built in the 1970s were unaccounted for and were “a potentially perfect weapon for nuclear terrorism and blackmail”.

Lebed was blackballed by the Russian military establishment and thrown off a commission set up to investigate his allegations. Russian nuclear officials ridiculed them, but the following month Lebed named the weapons as the RA-115 and the RA-115-01 (an underwater variant), each weighing roughly 30 kilograms. Aleksei Yablokov, a former environmental adviser to President Yeltsin, said that 84 out of a total of 132 were missing. At a conference in Berlin, Lebed said he believed that most of them had been stationed in border areas no longer within Russia. He warned one of his detractors, the then Prime Minister Viktor Chernomyrdin: “Sleep, Viktor Stepanovich, and you just might not wake up.”

Lebed is now running for a second term as governor of Krasnoyarsk and has refused all interview requests since the attacks. However, a former Western diplomat who travels frequently to Central Asia confirmed last week that the suitcase-sized weapons almost certainly exist. “It’s very plausible that a device has been smuggled out and even to Afghanistan,” he adds. “Osama bin Laden is as possible a recipient as Saddam Hussein.”

Compact nuclear weapons offer terrorists an easy answer to the question “Why build when you can buy?” Pakistan’s rush to build an estimated 120 nuclear warheads has given bin Laden yet another option — theft. President Musharraf insists that his nuclear arsenal is safe, but the US considers the risk of Pakistani warheads falling into the wrong hands so great given the number of Taleban sympathisers in his ISI intelligence service that it has offered to fly in perimeter security for the country’s nuclear bases and install fail-safe mechanisms on its weapons to prevent them being detonated.

So far Musharraf has declined the offer. Pakistan and the West must therefore hope that bin Laden has failed in all his attempts to buy nuclear weapons and material. But even if he has, the risk of nuclear terrorism remains real and serious, thanks to Saddam. The Iraqi dictator nearly bankrupted his country trying to build nuclear weapons before the arrival of UN inspectors in the wake of the Gulf War. This has not stopped him trying again since their departure.

The proof, or the closest thing to it, is in the form of a strange order placed with the Siemens electronics giant by the Iraqi Government in 1998 for six lithotripter devices designed to break up kidney stones with highpowered shock waves. As medical machinery the lithotripters were not covered by UN sanctions. Each used a precision electronic switch, and Iraq ordered an extra 120 of these. As Gary Milhollin of the Wisconsin Project wrote in The New Yorker: “Iraq’s strange hankering for this particular spare part becomes less mysterious when one reflects that the switch in question has another use: it can trigger an atomic bomb.”

Former UN weapons inspectors in Iraq believed in 1999 that Saddam already had the components for three nuclear weapons, each needing 32 electronic switches. Asked how scared we should be of the possibility of an Iraqi-manufactured nuclear weapon detonating as the conflict unfolds, Dr Mylroie replies: “Scared is not the right word. This is war. It’s like the Second World War. People have to make the right decisions; if they make the wrong decisions tens or hundreds of thousands could die.”

And according to the "Boston Globe:"

BIN LADEN SOUGHT NUCLEAR MATTER OFFICIALS HAVE NOT CONFIRMED THE PURCHASE

Author(s): Elizabeth Neuffer, Globe Staff

Date: September 16, 2001 Page: A26 Section: National/Foreign

NEW YORK - Accused terrorist Osama bin Laden and associates in his Al Qaeda organization have tried several times to buy nuclear weapons, including one 1994 attempt to buy uranium, according to federal prosecutors.

Since then, several Arabic newspapers have reported that bin Laden, now considered the chief suspect by the Bush administration for last week's attacks in New York and Washington, has succeeded in obtaining nuclear material. In 1998, the Saudi-owned, London-based Arabic newspaper, Al-Hayat, declared bin Laden had obtained nuclear weapons - a report that was never confirmed.

But several months later, the Arabic newsmagazine Al-Watan reported bin Laden, working with organized crime sources in the former Soviet republics, had obtained nuclear material. The Saudi exile reportedly gave Chechen gangsters $30 million in cash and two tons of opium in exchange for about 20 warheads, the magazine said.

Although officials have not confirmed the purchase, bin Laden's interest in the deadly weapons is not out of character for a man CIA director George Tenet, in congressional testimony earlier this year, called one of America's greatest national security threats, both at home and abroad.

As bin Laden told Time magazine in a 1998 interview, acquiring weapons "for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have, indeed, acquired these [nuclear, biological, or chemical] weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

The first sign that bin Laden wanted to buy nuclear weapons was in 1998, with the arrest of Mamdouh Mahmud Salim, a key aide and co-founder of Al Qaeda. Arrested in Munich, Germany, Salim was charged with acting on behalf of bin Laden to obtain nuclear materials, including highly enriched uranium.

That same year, Salim and four other suspects were accused of plotting the deadly bombings of two American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Salim pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges and his case was separated from the other defendants. He is scheduled to stand trial next week on a separate stabbing case involving a prison officer.

During their trial earlier this year, federal prosecutors portrayed Al Qaeda as a vast and sophisticated network dedicated to following through on bin Laden's decrees, including a call to eliminate all Americans.

A star witness in the case, Jamal Ahmad Al-Fadl, a Sudanese national, described how he had been assigned the task of buying uranium for bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan. He was offered a 2- to 3-foot canister of uranium, with South African markings, for a price of $1.5 million, he said.

He testified he often told merchants the quality of the uranium was far more important than the cost. He then handed off the transaction to a higher-up. Although he did not know if the uranium was ever purchased, he said he received $10,000 for his efforts, and an associate later told him the uranium would be tested in Cyprus.

Al-Fadl, who split with bin Laden over money disputes, is now in the FBI's witness protection program after turning himself in at an American Embassy in 1996. At that time, he demanded protection and said he knew of plots against the United States.

"They try to make war against your country," he recalled telling officials at the time. When officials asked what he meant, Al-Fadl answered, "Maybe they try to do something inside the United States and they try to fight the United States Army outside, and also they try to make bomb against some embassy outside."

The 1998 embassy bombings left 224 dead, including 12 Americans. Two of the men convicted in that plot have been sentenced to life in prison. The other two, convicted of conspiring in the attack, have yet to be sentenced.

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