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US Doesn't Dismiss Bin Laden Claims
CBS ^
| Nov. 10, 2001
| CBS
Posted on 11/10/2001 1:39:02 PM PST by CommiesOut
- US Doesn't Dismiss Bin Laden Claims
- Says He Has Nuclear And Chemical Weapons
- Bush, Pakistani President To Meet; New US Aid In Works
- Taliban Confirm Losing Key Northern City
Nov. 10, 2001
(CBS) Terror suspect Osama bin Laden claims he has nuclear and chemical weapons and will unleash them if the United States uses similar weapons against him, according to an interview published Saturday in one of Pakistan's largest newspapers.
"I wish to declare that if America used chemical and nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent," the Dawn newspaper quoted bin Laden as saying in an interview Wednesday night.
Though the White House regards bin Laden as a lying murderer, it is not dismissing his claims, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Knoller.
Knoller quotes an official as saying the administration takes those statements seriously. The official notes that as far back as three years ago, bin Laden was quoted as saying he considers the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to be a holy duty.
Asked if the U.S. believes bin Laden has obtained such weapons, reports Knoller, the official would only say the US will do all it can to prevent that.
Russia's President Putin told a group of American journalists in the Kremlin Saturday that he doubts bin Laden has weapons of mass desruction, but the claims can't just be dismissed out of hand.
He flatly denied that any Russian or former Soviet weapons of mass destruction could get into the hands of terrorists.
President Bush, in his first appearance before the U.N. General Assembly Saturday, said the threat of terrorism was global, and warned that those behind the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States would use chemical, biological or nuclear weapons as soon as they were able.
Mr. Bush asked for action in the U.S.-led war on terrorism instead of sympathy for the Sept. 11 attacks.
"The time for sympathy has now passed. The time for action has now arrived," Bush told 48 presidents and prime ministers and 114 foreign ministers at the opening of the annual gathering in New York.
The president is expected to announce a new installment of U.S. aid to Pakistan, a key ally in the U.S.-led war against global terrorism, White House officials said.
The package is to be announced as Bush and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf meet on the fringes of the U.N. General Assembly opening session Saturday.
One official said the package would include trade incentives and other measures.
Musharraf said in an interview published in The New York Times on Saturday that he would ask Bush to make concrete "gestures" of appreciation for Pakistan's support, including
the release of 28 F-16 fighters bought by Pakistan in the 1980s but held up by U.S. sanctions imposed in 1990.
In a speech to the General Assembly on Saturday, Musharraf said, "we need financial and commercial support on an urgent basis."
Musharraf also declared his readiness to hold talks with India on nuclear and conventional arms in an effort to stabilize South Asia, where tensions have risen since the Sept 11 U.S. attacks.
The U.S.-led military campaign against Afghanistan's ruling Taliban, aimed at destroying the al Qaeda network of suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, has generated
protests among many Taliban sympathizers in Pakistan.
A U.S. official said it was "highly unlikely" Musharraf would win release of the fighters and said he did not expect the issue to be discussed during the meeting.
In Afghanistan, triumphant opposition troops patrolled the streets of the strategic northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif on Saturday, just hours after routing the ruling Taliban militia in the first major victory of the U.S.-led war, and an opposition commander said an attack on the capital, Kabul, would start within days.
Click here to read the transcript of an interview
with CBS News Anchor Dan Rather and
Secretary of State Colin Powell.
In Washington Friday, Secretary of State Colin Powell told reporters it would be best if the opposition did not move immediately toward Kabul, since the city's population is likely to be hostile to it.
The Taliban conceded they had lost Mazar-i-Sharif to the northern alliance. "Yes, Mazar has gone," Taliban Defense Minister Obaidullah Akhund told Reuters in a brief interview.
Following Mazar-e-Sharif's capture, an opposition commander, Mohammed Mohaqik, said anti-Taliban forces quickly seized three northern provincial capitals - Shibarghan in Jozjan province; Aybak in Samangan province; and Maimana in Faryab province.
There was no comment from the Taliban on the opposition claims, and no foreign reporters were in the area. However, taking Aybak would cut the main escape route for Taliban soldiers withdrawing from Mazar-e-Sharif to Kabul.
If the other northern towns have also fallen, the Taliban may be abandoning large swaths of territory populated by ethnic minorities and redeploying their forces to defend Kabul and other strongholds of the dominant Pashtun ethnic group.
"This morning the city is quiet," said Karim Khalili, spokesman for the Shiite Muslim opposition, said of Mazar-e-Sharif. "There is no fighting. All the Taliban are gone."
Click here for the latest
on the anthrax investigation.
The Taliban's Bakhtar News Agency said sustained bombing by U.S. warplanes had forced fighters to pull out of Mazar-e-Sharif Friday with their weapons and equipment.
"For seven days continuously, they have been bombing Taliban positions. They used very large bombs," said Bakhtar chief Abdul Henan Hemat.
Meanwhile, American B-52 bombers and other warplanes attacked at the front line north of Kabul on Saturday, and enormous clouds of smoke billowed skyward from Taliban positions.
The fall of Mazar-e-Sharif opens up a land bridge to neighboring Uzbekistan that will allow a flood of weapons and supplies to be ferried to the opposition alliance. It would also give U.S.-led forces their first major staging ground in Afghanistan for the campaign against the Taliban, explains CBS News correspondent David Martin.
Correspondent Martin reports the Taliban still hold an advantage in tanks and are trying to rush reinforcements to the front, so Pentagon officials say a Taliban counterattack is still possible.
The United States says it has no evidence that bin Laden possesses nuclear weapons. Intelligence experts, however, believe his fighters have experimented with crude chemical weapons at a training camp in Afghanistan.
National security adviser Condoleezza Rice said the United States had "no credible evidence at this point of a specific threat of that kind."
Pakistan's Foreign Ministry spokesman said today that if nuclear weapons have gotten into the wrong hands, they did not come from his country, reports CBS News correspondent Tom Fenton. A spokesman says Pakistan's nuclear assets are in safe hands, and there's no need to worry that will change.
"We feel it's possible bin Laden has perhaps some nuclear material which he may be willing to deploy in a radiological 'dirty bomb' but in terms of a nuclear blast that would destroy a large amount of territory and take many lives, I'm very skeptical of that," Rose Gottemoeller a Senior Associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told CBS Radio News.
Still, "it is upping the ante because suddenly he's making it very explicit that he wants to play in this kind of game," the former Clinton Administration official added.
Hamid Mir, a Pakistani journalist sympathetic to the Taliban and bin Laden's biographer, conducted the Dawn interview. He said he asked bin Laden where he allegedly got the weapons. "Go to the next question," bin Laden replied.
Mir said the interview was conducted at an "undisclosed location" near Kabul.
Mir said he was blindfolded and driven in a jeep from Kabul on Wednesday night to a very cold place where he could hear the sound of anti-aircraft fire.
Bin Laden eventually arrived, accompanied by a dozen bodyguards and his deputy Ayman el-Zawahri.
The Dawn published a photograph of Mir sitting indoors with bin Laden on cushions on the floor against a brown backdrop. Bin Laden wore a white turban and scarf with a camouflage jacket. A Kalashnikov rifle lay at his side.
In the interview, Bin Laden did not admit responsibility for the attacks in which terrorists steered passenger planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.
But he said they were justified because Washington had been arming Israel, and was conducting "atrocities" against Muslims in Iraq, the disputed region of Kashmir and elsewhere.
"The Sept. 11 attacks were not targeted at women and children," bin Laden said. "The real targets were America's icons of military and economic power."
Bin Laden denied reports that he was suffering a kidney illness and praised Mullah Mohammed Omar, the Taliban's supreme leader.
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TOPICS: Front Page News; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS:
To: madrussian; malarski; Askel5; GROUCHOTWO; Zviadist; kristinn; Free the USA; struwwelpeter...
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To: CommiesOut
I have no doubt that Osama could have nuclear or chemical weapons, but if he does why hasnt he used them?
3
posted on
11/10/2001 1:46:28 PM PST
by
woofie
To: CommiesOut; woofie
"I wish to declare that if America used chemical and nuclear weapons against us, then we may retort with chemical and nuclear weapons. We have the weapons as a deterrent If the US did use nukes against Osama, what makes him think hed be alive to retaliate?
Osama would probably have used nukes and such already if he had been able to get them into the US.
4
posted on
11/10/2001 1:51:16 PM PST
by
klee
To: CommiesOut
Does anyone seriously think that a man who would do what Bin Laden has already done would hesitate to use nuclear weapons first, whether or not we do? Bush has rightly concluded that we cannot afford to sit back and wait for the next terrorist strike, but we must disrupt and destroy these networks now.
It's perfectly possible that Bin Laden DOES have nuclear weapons, as has often been pointed out here, and simply hasn't yet had a chance to put them in place and use them. We are better off draining the swamp from which this stuff comes than trusting to mercy and good will. He has shown none of either of these qualities.
It does no good to plead and beg with terrorists and fanatics, despite what the Yuppies at CBS may think.
5
posted on
11/10/2001 1:53:44 PM PST
by
Cicero
Comment #6 Removed by Moderator
To: woofie
Because he isn`t that crazy. One nuke in this country will see smoking holes in the Mid-East. I might very well be the end of Islam as it is known today. He wants to win not lose, by waiting us out, that we will tire of the war. Then he could regroup and do is all over. We must be in this for the long haul, no matter what it takes. We can not afford to declare victory and go home.
7
posted on
11/10/2001 1:54:43 PM PST
by
vladog
To: woofie
I have no doubt that Osama could have nuclear or chemical weapons, but if he does why hasnt he used them? For the same reason we or Russia haven't used them. Nukes have become a last ditch weapon. The only way Bin Laden would use one if he had it, was if it was totally over, he knew for sure he was going to die, etc.
He may still be hoping that there will be a Ramadan pause in bombing, he might sneak out the border and live to fight another day.
He uses a nuke on us, and we go postal. We are being very measured in our response now, we would literally turn places into parking lots if we were nuked, and he knows it. He still cares, if he is pinned down, the Taliban surrenders, then he would use a nuke as an F- You to america.
8
posted on
11/10/2001 1:57:16 PM PST
by
dogbyte12
To: CommiesOut
Pound him and his friends until they give up the nukes. If he doesn't give up the nukes then pound him as retaliation for the psychological terrorism. Pound ObL and all who associate with him. Pound them to radioactive glass and pound that to sand and scatter the sand in the sea and then p!$$ in the ocean.
First tell ObL that we use pork-fat bullet lube and that the adhesive between the fiberglass and the backing of the thermal insullation of the WTC is made of pork renderings also. Paradise will be a lonely place for ObL and his millions of sex starved virgins.
To: CommiesOut
So ... he threatens to use 'em if we use 'em first ... so what? We don't need to use NBC weapons. Not when we have bunker-busters and daisy-cutters.
I heard somewhere that Bin Laden said he could reach a US shore with his nuclear bombs....so ...
everyone realizes where they are gonna land don't ya?
Right here in Palm Beach County Florida of course.
11
posted on
11/10/2001 2:33:10 PM PST
by
Sungirl
To: CommiesOut
Here we go again. It must be insulting to CBS's Fenton, Knoller and Martin to have Condie Rice contradict them.
The least CBS could do is get Mir to take a photo of that very crowded cave of bin-Laden's with anthrax, nuclear and all kinds of stuff.
In spite of being so well prepared, it's odd that bin-Laden doesn't shoot down any planes. Didn't we spend months listening to how many Stinger missiles those people had?
To: dogbyte12
I've been thinking along the same lines as you have dogbyte. I think it's a bit foolish and premature to dismiss the idea that they may have nukes.
Also, it's possible he does have them and his cells all over the world have been instructed to use them when and/or if he is killed or captured.
This would make him even more of a martyr and "Godlike" figure in the radical muslim world.
Leaving his nuclear legacy from the grave, so to speak.
MKM
13
posted on
11/10/2001 2:43:07 PM PST
by
mykdsmom
Comment #14 Removed by Moderator
To: GROUCHOTWO
To add to confusion: "Mir" in Russian means "peace", hehe!
There was a commie correspondent in old country named Ryszard Wojna ("wojna"="war"). Of course da*n politburo, to make our lives more miserable, decided to sent him to Bonn during Cold War period.
This sob used to scare hell out of us...
To: CommiesOut
A report on Drudge reads that US and Pak Intel is thinking they have two suitcase nukes "INSIDE" US Borders.Go read it!Blackbird.
Comment #17 Removed by Moderator
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