The problem for us is Obama. He does not believe this can happen. It is not in his worldview. islam is peaceful, the bad guys are a few disgruntled students who would change, if only the US hugged them, and gave them coffee and tea rather than bombs and death. When this happens, as it will, if he is still the president, I cannot imagine the mayhem. We will be told not to jump to conclusions, that his administration will find those responsible and bring them to justice.
The problem - tens of thousands of Americans will be dead, and he will want to bring someone to justice.
Of course the Bush administration is not free of responsibility - had they simply ignored the Democrats for the last several years and plowed ahead with intelligence gathering methods, perhaps we would know more. Had Bush ignored the rights of killers, and used whatever methods necessary to extract inform ation when possible, perhaps we would have known more. Had Bush spent more time pushing for the rapid response teams, more satellite coverage of our cities and coasts to analyze whatever we can detect from those tools, perhaps we could have found them while they were planning their evil deeds. I am sure there are other tools we could have been using and should have, rather than to be tied down to hearings and investigations into intelligence gathering methods.
Instead, Americans will die for their failures; and then many innocent Muslims will die as a result of the response to their failures. It never ends.
Al-Qaeda seeks WMD, US unprepared: reports
Jan 26 11:27 PM US/Eastern
Agence France Presse
The United States has not done enough to protect the country against the threat of weapons of mass destruction even as Al-Qaeda appears intent on staging a large-scale attack, reports said.
A bipartisan panel warned that the government had failed to adopt measures to counter the danger posed by extremists using WMD, saying the administration lacked plans for a rapid response to a possible biological attack.
"Nearly a decade after September 11, 2001, one year after our original report, and one month after the Christmas Day bombing attempt, the United States is failing to address several urgent threats, especially bioterrorism," said former senator Bob Graham, chair of the Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism.
He said that Washington no longer had "the luxury of a slow learning curve, when we know Al-Qaeda is interested in bioweapons."
In its "report card," the commission also gave the federal government low marks for failing to recruit a new generation of national security experts and for failing to improve congressional oversight of intelligence and homeland security agencies.
The findings came as a former CIA officer wrote in a report that Al-Qaeda's leaders have been working methodically since the 1990s to secure weapons that could inflict massive bloodshed.
Although other extremists had looked into obtaining such weapons, Al-Qaeda "is the only group known to be pursuing a long-term, persistent and systematic approach to developing weapons to be used in mass casualty attacks," wrote Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who led the CIA's WMD department.
He acknowledged that the failure to find WMD in Iraq had damaged the US government's credibility and had spread skepticism about the threat posed by Al-Qaeda getting its hands on nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
"That said, WMD terrorism is not Iraqi WMD," he wrote in the report released by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
He argued that intelligence on Al-Qaeda's activities was much more extensive and reliable than the information about Saddam Hussein's weapons programs.
His report said Al-Qaeda's efforts to develop biological and nuclear weapons were not "empty rhetoric" and that the group's leaders appeared to have ruled out smaller-scale attacks with simpler devices.
"If Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants had been interested in employing crude chemical, biological and radiological materials in small-scale attacks, there is little doubt they could have done so by now," he wrote.
In a "highly compartmentalized" operation, Al-Qaeda had pursued parallel tracks to try to secure the destructive weapons, building a biological lab and separately acquiring strains of anthrax bacteria before the attacks of September 11, 2001, the report said.
The anthrax was apparently never successfully placed in a weapon and scientists working at a lab in Afghanistan had to flee when US-led forces invaded after the 9/11 attacks, it said.
In 2003, US officials feared that Al-Qaeda was on the verge of obtaining atomic weapons after intercepting a message from a Saudi operative referring to plans to secure Russian nuclear devices.
The sensitive intelligence was passed on to Riyadh and the Saudi government then arrested Al-Qaeda suspects in a major crackdown.
But US officials were never sure if the nuclear plot was disrupted or merely pushed underground.
The former CIA officer also said Al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in 2003 had called off plans for a chemical attack on New York's subways "for something better," a cryptic remark that remains a mystery.
The bipartisan commission on the WMD threat, created by Congress, had said in its initial report in December 2008 that it was "more likely than not" that a terror attack using weapons of mass destruction would be carried out somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.
terrorism
Subscribe To
Posts
Comments