Al Qaeda leaders, long known to covet biological and chemical weapons, have reached at least the threshold of production and may already have manufactured some of them, according to a newly obtained cache of documentary evidence and interrogations recently conducted by the U.S. government. Three people with access to written reports said the emerging picture depicts the al Qaeda biochemical weapons program as considerably more advanced than U.S. analysts knew. The picture continues to sharpen daily, one official said, because translation and analysis of the documents continues, and because the operative captured with them began divulging meaningful information about production plans only this week.
| Killing people by any means is their fervent desire... |
Leaders at the top of al Qaeda's hierarchy, the evidence shows, completed plans and obtained the materials required to manufacture two biological toxins — botulinum and salmonella — and the chemical poison cyanide. They are also close to a feasible production plan for anthrax, a far more lethal weapon, which kills 90 percent of untreated victims if spread by inhalation and as many as 75 percent of those treated when the first symptoms become evident. Among the documents seized was a direction to purchase bacillus anthracis, the bacterium that causes anthrax disease
*O.K., before we freak out, it's highly unlikely that someone suffering from anthrax would be "untreated" here in the US. Also, that 75% death rate mentioned in the article seems pretty high given the actually number of deaths from the "anthrax letter" attacks after September 11th.*
Most of the new information comes from handwritten documents and computer hard drives seized during the March 1 capture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Significantly, one official noted, Mohammed was arrested at a Rawalpindi, Pakistan, home owned by Abdul Quddoos Khan, a bacteriologist with access to production materials and facilities who has since disappeared.
*Hopefully, this Khan guy "disappeared" into our hands. If not, we got another guy to put onto the FBI's "most wanted terrorist" list.*
| Qudoos' son was nabbed with KSM and should still be in custody. The old man is "retired." |
Because of Mohammed's central role in operations, one senior official said, his apparent connection to biochemical weapons is a "very scary" sign that al Qaeda's efforts reach well beyond the hypothetical. At first analysts were unsure of Mohammed's direct involvement because the documents were not written in his hand and were seized in a house that does not belong to him. But digitally scanned images of the same documents have been extracted from one of Mohammed's computer hard drives. Confronted with that evidence, a second U.S. expert said, Mohammed has begun to talk about the production program in the past two or three days. What the documents and debriefings show, the first official said, is that "he was involved in anthrax production, and [knew] quite a bit about it."
*So Khalid is still talking and still producing useful information. That's interesting.*
"Time for your giggle juice, Khalid!"
"Oooh, thankew, nursh..." |
Government experts are also filling out their picture of Ayman Zawahiri, al Qaeda's second-ranking leader, as the central figure in overseeing and funding the biological and chemical weapons effort. Investigators have known since the late 1990s that in early experiments, al Qaeda killed animals with homemade contact poisons at its Derunta camp in Afghanistan. The project there fell under the command of Midhat Mursi, an Egyptian who uses the alias of Abu Kebab and is among the most-wanted al Qaeda operatives still at large. But Mursi is not thought to have sophisticated knowledge of biology.
*Zwahiri, if memory serves me, is a medical doctor gone bad.*
| Mursi was in Chechnya, when last heard from... |
What is new in the recent documents is al Qaeda recruited competent scientists, including a Pakistani microbiologist whom the officials interviewed this week declined to name.
Hmm, why?
| Because he's "retired," perhaps? |
The documents describe specific timelines for producing biochemical weapons and include a bar graph depicting the parallel processes that must take place between Days 1 and 31 of manufacture. Included are inventories of equipment and indications of readiness to grow seed stocks of pathogen in nutrient baths and then dry the resulting liquid slurry into a form suitable for aerosol dispersal. U.S. officials said the evidence neither establishes nor rules out that al Qaeda completed manufacture. The documents are undated and unsigned and cryptic about essential details. They do not mention the whereabouts of actual or planned production. Because of al Qaeda's limited sophistication, the documents do not support a theory that al Qaeda had a role in the anthrax letters mailed in late 2001 to Senate and news media offices that killed five people. |