Published Sunday
November 21, 2004
Bin Laden after nukes from Russia, CIA expert says
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WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden wants to buy a nuclear weapon on the Russian black market and detonate it in an American city, one of the CIA's top experts on the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks said.
"I don't think it is a far-fetched thing," said Michael Scheuer, a 22-year veteran of the spy agency and former chief of the CIA's bin Laden counter-terrorism team.
Scheuer, who retired last week from the CIA, is the author of the book "Imperial Hubris," which asserts that the Bush administration is losing the war against terrorism.
Bin Laden "always said it was a religious obligation for Muslims to have the same weapons as their enemies,' Scheuer told reporters Friday. "He has clearly said that he would use it. He doesn't intend it as a deterrent. It is going to be a first strike weapon."
Scheuer said CIA assessments of bin Laden show that the Saudi-born leader of al Qaida is well-organized in his quest to acquire nuclear weapons.
American intelligence has documented since 1996 that he "has pursued weapons of mass destruction in a manner which was unlike any other so-called terrorist group we had ever seen," Scheuer said.
For example, bin Laden has a sophisticated network of scientists and engineers who troll for available mass-killing weapons. The network, said Scheuer, is "a very professional acquisition system."
Scheuer said bin Laden would "most likely" acquire nuclear weapons from Russian sources - "some sort of a Mafia organization" - rather than from Pakistan, an Islamic country with nuclear weapons and with a history of spreading its nuclear know-how.
The main reason Russia would be a likely source, he said, is the vastness of the Russian nuclear weapons complex and the rampant corruption there.
Bin Laden already "clearly has a presence in the former Soviet Union (and) he has shown a strong willingness to work with un-Islamic people if it furthers his game," Scheuer said.
Bin Laden also received authorization from a Saudi religious cleric in May 2003 to use nuclear weapons against the United States, he said. The edict said that bin Laden could kill millions of Americans because the country was responsible for killing many Muslims.
President Bush and Sen. John Kerry, the failed Democratic presidential nominee, agreed during this fall's election debates that nuclear terrorism is the most dangerous threat facing the country.
U.S. officials don't know how many thousands of tactical nuclear weapons Russia has or whether those weapons are safely guarded.
Jonathan Medalia, a nuclear terrorism expert at the Congressional Research Service - part of the Library of Congress - wrote in a recent report that Russia and Pakistan are the "nations of greatest concern as potential sources of weapons or fissile materials" for terrorists.
Russia in particular "has many tactical nuclear weapons, which tend to be lower in yield but more dispersed and apparently less secure than strategic weapons," he wrote.
Former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., onetime chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he worries that "almost nothing is being done" to accurately count and safeguard these Russian weapons.
The Russians "have small tactical battlefield weapons that were manufactured by the thousands or tens of thousands during the Cold War, and we have no idea how many the Russians have," he told PBS in February. "We hope they do. We hope they have an inventory system, because these are portable weapons that could be easily transported, stolen or sold. We don't have time to delay on this one. http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_np=0&u_pg=54&u_sid=1264519
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Время выбрало нас
Нехорошие разговоры, однако. Интересно, отражает ли это мнение официальную точку зрения, и если да, то к чему они клонят?