http://www.startribune.com/stories/1576/3526765.html
Report: Al-Qaida affiliate got nerve
agent in Iraq
Washington Post
Published Dec. 12, 2002
TERR12
WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Bush administration
has received a
credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with Al-Qaida took
possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in
October, according to two officials with firsthand knowledge of the
report and its source.
They said government analysts suspect
that the transaction involved
the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it
overland through Turkey.
If the report is true, it would be
the first known acquisition of a
nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by Al-Qaida or its
affiliates.
It also would be the most concrete
evidence to support the charge,
made for months by President Bush, and his advisers, that Al-Qaida
terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq.
If advanced publicly by the White
House, the report could be used to
rebut Iraq's assertion in a 12,000-page declaration that it had
destroyed its entire stock of chemical weapons.
On the central question of whether
Iraqi President Saddam Hussein
knew about such a transaction, U.S. analysts are said to have no
evidence. Because Saddam's Special Security Organization, run by
his son Qusay, has long exerted tight control over concealed
weapons programs, officials said they presume it would be difficult
to transfer a chemical agent without Saddam's knowledge.
Knowledgeable officials, speaking
without White House permission,
said information about the transfer came from a sensitive and
credible source whom they declined to discuss. Among the
hundreds of leads in the Threat Matrix, a daily compilation by the
CIA, this one has drawn the kind of attention reserved for a much
smaller number.
"The way we gleaned the information
makes us feel confident it is
accurate," said one official whose responsibilities are directly
involved with the report. "I throw about 99 percent of the spot reports
away when I look at them. I didn't throw this one away."
Open to interpretation
At a time when Bush is eager to make
a public case linking Iraq to
the United States' principal terrorist enemy, authorized national
security spokesmen declined to discuss the substance of their
information about the transfer of lethal chemicals. Those who
disclosed it have no policymaking responsibilities on Iraq and
expressed no strong views on whether the United States should go
to war there.
Even authorized spokesmen, with one
exception, addressed the
report on the condition of anonymity. They said that the principal
source on the chemical transfer was uncorroborated and that
indications it involved a nerve agent were open to interpretation.
"We are concerned because of
Al-Qaida's interest in obtaining and
using weapons of mass destruction, including chemical, and we
continue to seek evidence and intelligence information with regards
to their planning activity," said Gordon Johndroe, spokesman for
Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. Johndroe was the only
official authorized by the White House to discuss the matter on the
record.
"Have they obtained chemical
weapons?" Johndroe said. "I do not
have any hard, concrete evidence that they have." Pressed on
whether the information referred to a nerve agent, Johndroe said
that "there is no specific intelligence that limits Al-Qaida's interest to
one particular chemical or biological weapon over the other."
One official who spoke without permission
said a sign of the
government's concern is its "ramping up opportunities to collect
more, to figure out what would be the routes, where would they be
taking the material, how would they deploy it, how are they
transporting it, what are the personnel?" The official added: "We're
not just sitting back and waiting for something to happen."
A Defense Department official, who
said he had seen only a
summary version of the chemical weapons report, speculated that it
might be connected to a message distributed last week to U.S.
armed forces overseas. An official elsewhere said the message
resulted only from an analyst's hypothetical concern.
Prepared by the Defense Intelligence
Agency, last week's "Turkey
Defense Terrorism Threat Awareness Message" warned of a
possible chemical weapons attack by Al-Qaida on the Incirlik Air
Base in southern Turkey. Incirlik is an important NATO facility from
which the U.S.-led coalition in 1991 launched thousands of bombing
runs to force Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait. Turkey has given
conditional agreement to its use in the event of a new war with Iraq.
According to two officials, a second
related threat report was
distributed in Washington this week. The CIA message described a
European ally's warning that the United States might face chemical
attack in a big-city subway if war broke out with Iraq. A U.S.
government spokesman said the European ally offered little
evidence and "the credibility of the report has not been determined."
Uncertainties
Among the uncertainties about the
suspected weapon transfer in
Iraq is the precise relationship of the Islamic operatives to Al-Qaida.
One official said the transaction involved Asbat al-Ansar, a
Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group that recently established an
enclave in northern Iraq. Asbat al-Ansar is affiliated with Osama bin
Laden's Al-Qaida organization and receives funding from it, but
officials said they did not know whether its pursuit of chemical
weapons came specifically on Al-Qaida's behalf.
The government is also uncertain whether
the transaction involved a
chemical agent alone, or an agent in what is known as a
weaponized form -- incorporated into a delivery system such as a
rocket or a bomb. Among the reasons for suspecting VX is that it is
the most portable of Iraq's chemical weapons, capable of inflicting
mass casualties with a quantity that a single courier could transport.
After initial denials, Iraq admitted
in the 1990s to manufacturing tons
of VX and of two less sophisticated nerve agents, Sarin and Tabun.
First developed as a weapon by the
U.S. Army, VX is an oily liquid,
odorless and tasteless, that kills on contact with the skin or by
inhalation in aerosol form. It is treatable in the first minutes after
exposure but otherwise leads swiftly to fatal convulsions and
respiratory failure. The United States, a signatory to the Chemical
Weapons Convention, destroyed the last of its stocks of VX and
other chemical agents in November 2000.
U.S. military forces, hazardous materials
teams and some
ambulance systems carry emergency antidotes. They usually come
in auto-injectors containing atropine and an oxime, drugs that
reverse the neuromuscular blockade of a nerve agent. Atropine-like
drugs have other uses in anesthesia and in treating cardiac arrest
and are often stocked in hospitals.
False denials
During inspections by the U.N. Special
Commission, or UNSCOM,
in the 1990s, Iraq denied production of any chemical weapon other
than mustard agents. Faced with contrary evidence, it eventually
acknowledged manufacture of 3.9 tons of VX and 3,859 tons in all of
lethal chemicals. It also admitted to filling more than 10,000 bombs,
rockets and missile warheads with Sarin. It denied having done so
with its most potent agent, VX, but an international commission of
experts assembled by UNSCOM said the evidence suggested
otherwise.
UNSCOM said in its final report, in
January 1999, that it could not
account for 1.5 tons of the VX known to have been produced in Iraq.
Only once has a chemical weapon been
used successfully in a
terrorist attack. During the morning rush hour of March 20, 1995, the
Japanese cult Aum Shinri Kyo placed packages on five subway
trains converging on Tokyo's central station. When punctured, the
packages spread vaporized Sarin through subway cars and then
into stations as the trains pulled in.
In all, the Sarin contaminated 15
stations of the world's busiest
subway system, putting 1,000 riders in the hospital and killing 12.
"Psychologically, use of nerve
agent in the United States would send
people over the deep end, but it probably wouldn't kill very many
people," said an official whose responsibilities have included
assessment and disruption of the threat.
--
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It's glib and evasive to say that "one man's terrorist
is another man's freedom fighter," because the "freedom
fighters" are usually quite willing to kill their "own"
civilians as well.
~~Christopher Hitchens, Terrorism
Notes toward a definition.
Posted Monday, November 18, 2002
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