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Thursday, October 18, 2007

Nuclear Al-Qaeda

Portents of A Nuclear Al-Qaeda

By David Ignatius
Thursday, October 18, 2007; A25

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department's director of intelligence, he's responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.

With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature -- a mushroom cloud.

We've all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists' job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen's analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches.

But it's worth listening to his warnings -- not because they induce more numbing paralysis but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That's why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. Mowatt-Larssen doesn't want to anguish later that he didn't sound the alarm in time.

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after Sept. 11, when then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to create a new branch on weapons of mass destruction in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare the chapter on al-Qaeda's nuclear efforts that appears in Tenet's memoir, " At the Center of the Storm." Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: "Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capabilities. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his haven in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet saying that "al-Qaeda has the right to kill 4 million Americans" in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaeda were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." Interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaeda didn't yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.

Most chilling of all was Zawahiri's decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind." What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don't know.

After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. Many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda doesn't have nuclear capability today. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it was carried out? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.

The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.

http://tinyurl.com/2hq8ry

Sunday, October 14, 2007

ex-CEO tells of revenge over NSA spy program

Nacchio says feds punished Qwest: report
In insider-trading appeal, ex-CEO tells of revenge over NSA spy program
By MarketWatch
Last Update: 10:22 AM ET Oct 13, 2007


WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio alleged in court documents that the federal government canceled a lucrative contract with the National Security Agency after the company refused to participate in a separate surveillance program that the telecom firm thought might be illegal, according to a news report Saturday.

Nacchio, who was convicted in April on 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA had asked Qwest to participate in a warrantless surveillance program more than six months before the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Washington Post reported, citing court documents unsealed in Denver this week. Nacchio is appealing his conviction.

In the filings, Nacchio suggests that Qwest's decision not to participate in the surveillance program prompted the government to cancel a separate NSA contract, the report said. Nacchio is arguing that the incident shows that his stock sale shouldn't have been considered improper.

Nacchio received a six-year federal prison sentence in July. Prosecutors said Nacchio made stock sales in 2001 while maintaining to the public that the company's business was still strong, even though his staff had advised him differently.

In court papers, Nacchio says he had been optimistic that Qwest would overcome weak sales because of the expected NSA contract, the Post reported.

According to Nacchio's account, the surveillance proposal was made at a meeting on Feb. 27, 2001, the report said.

The allegations could affect a congressional debate over whether telecom firms sued for disclosing customers' phone records and other data to the government after the Sept. 11 attacks should be given legal immunity, even if they didn't have court authorization, the newspaper said.

Spokesmen for the Justice Department, the NSA, the White House and the director of national intelligence declined to comment, citing Nacchio's ongoing legal case and the classified nature of NSA activities, the report said. End of Story

Tuesday, October 02, 2007

A message to Deborah King

> Those who protested the University's decision to host this speaker were reacting out of fear.

If you had a single relative or friend who fights in Iraq today or fought in World War II you wouldn't have written your diatribe of "fear" of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Perhaps you're unaware that when elected to the Iranian Presidency, hostages from 1979 appeared on the Today Show to publicly question why the CIA let a known terrorist participant for Ayatolla Khomeini. They know, they spent a lot of time with their captors.

Perhaps you aren't paying attention to sworn testimony on Capital Hill which states that IUDs which kill American soldiers in Iraq originate from Iran.

Perhaps you haven't heard that the Iranian populi elected a man that said one thing and did another and that the same populi has consistently tried to rebel, but the current President has too much military and police control over the state to allow this to happen. I suggest you google the police breaking of satellite dishes in Tehran to get an idea of how "free" Iran is.

Perhaps you are unaware that this man has said the Jewish holocaust didn't happen, that Israel should be wiped off the map.

Perhaps you should realize that the protesters wanted to see JUSTICE brought to a man who claims he rules a free country, when he is just a mask for a religious jihad.

Perhaps you should just do your political homework before making such backward, uninformed, idiotic statements when American blood fills the streets of Iraq.

Sit down and meditate. You will reach the conclusion that:
1) The Muslims have fought the Christians since the Crusades in the 11th century.
2) The radical Muslim sect will not stop until they inflict irreparable damage to the western way of life. With victory that means they want YOU TO WEAR A BURHKA.
4) No Muslim "leader", American or otherwise has stood up to say the radical agenda is wrong.
3) In context, and with doing some homework you will learn that the 1983 Beirut barracks bombing, WTC 1993, the Phillipines Airlines flight 434 bombing in 1993, Oklahoma 1995, the 1998 African Embassy bombings, TWA Flight 800 (for proof see the investigative dvd: http://tinyurl.com/29fj8h) the USS Cole bombing in 2000 and the WTC 2001 bombing are all Muslim versus Christian.

Check out this link: http://tinyurl.com/2hs4a4

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad supplies money and refuge to these KILLERS!

And you say the protesters base their activities in FEAR?

I've seen you work several times at the Bodhi Tree. I love the fact you're helping people, but DON'T go off half cocked (a gun slinger term) and tell the masses that we should welcome a known "axis of terror" supporter to our freedom loving country who welcomes EVERYONE with open arms including illegal immigrants and self professed terrorists alike.

You have disgraced many people, including the dead in your desire to fulfill your own meager ego.

Sincerely,

W.