WMD Commission Warns Of Bioterrorism Threat

A bipartisan commission created by Congress is reporting today that the Obama administration needs to pay more attention to the urgent and immediate threat of biological terrorism.

The United States is failing to address the threat of bioterrorism, according to leaders of a bipartisan panel that warns that an attack worldwide is more likely than not by the end of 2013.

The Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism, created by Congress in 2007, said in an interim report Wednesday that the administration and lawmakers have underfunded efforts to develop vaccines and drugs and have not named a high-level National Security Council appointee to improve biodefenses.

“The clock is ticking,” said former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), the commission’s chairman.

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Concern Grows Over Threatened Terror Attack on Germany

Concern over a possible al Qaeda terror attack in Germany is being fueled by buzz on a number of Jihadi web forums. Last week MEMRI reported that a message released on the Al-Falluja jihadist forum warned of an al Qaeda terror attack against Germany, to be carried out on an apparently ‘random’ Sunday during the month of October. Heading into another weekend, the increased chatter is obviously making many a bit nervous.

From CBS News

Jihadi Web forums have been abuzz with anticipation over the likelihood of an al Qaeda attack against Germany, with jihadi supporters speculating eagerly over potential targets, dates, timings, and even casualty numbers.

A blogger going by the name “Yaman Mokhaddab” posted what he claimed was “Western intelligence” giving 13 hints about the upcoming attacks, warning that they would be much worse than 9/11.

On the popular al-Fallojah forums, “Mohami al-Dawla” speculated Thursday about how many would be killed and the economic damage that would be inflicted. He speculated confidently that we are likely to witness the first WMD attack in the history of modern Jihad.

via Source.

NY Alleged Terror Suspect Zazi Indicted For Conspiring To Detonate WMD

How serious is the New York Terror threat the FBI is investigating?  Consider This: CBS 2 is reporting, Najibullah Zazi, the Denver man believed to be the central figure in a terror plot against the New York City transit system, has officially been indicted on charges of conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction against persons or property in the United States.

In addition,  WCBS  reports the FBI is expanding its investigation into the alleged terror plot and nearly every one of the FBI’s 57 field offices in the country and several overseas are now in on the case, working along with local police.

Very serious.

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See The Zazi Indictment

Zazi Detention Order

The Denver Post provides a detailed summary of the indictment and the evidence that led to it.

In the Denver Post report, (citing the detention order) it states Najibullah Zazi plotted for over a year to detonate homemade hydrogen peroxide bombs in the United States, had recently bought bomb-making supplies from beauty supply stores and was looking for “urgent” help in the past two weeks to make explosives.

[...]

In July and August, Zazi bought unusually large amounts of hydrogen peroxide and acetone products from beauty supply stores in the Denver metropolitan area, the document says. He searched the Internet for home improvement stores in Queens before driving a rental car for a two-day trip to the city, the document says.

[...]

The document says that on Sept. 6 and 7, Zazi tried to communicate with another individual “seeking to correct mixtures of ingredients to make explosives.” “Each communication,” the papers say, was “more urgent than the last.” On those days, Zazi rented a suite at a hotel in his hometown of Aurora, Colo., authorities charge. The room had a kitchen, and subsequent FBI testing for explosives and residue in the suite found the presence of residue in the vent above the stove.

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Denver Man Denies Ties To Terrorism – New York Terror Probe

Najibullah Zazi, a Colorado man whose visit to New York apparently set off government raids on several Queens apartments on Monday has denied having ties to al Qaeda or any other terrorist group.

“I have nothing to do with this,” said Zazi, 25, who was reached by telephone in Colorado on Monday and Tuesday. “This looks like it’s going toward me, which is more shocking every hour.”

Mr. Zazi said on Tuesday that he was contacting a lawyer, but he invited the F.B.I. to question him.

[...]

“I was hoping they’d come question me, give me a chance to question them, ask, ‘Why are you following me?’ ” said Mr. Zazi. “If they want to investigate, they can.”

He said he left Aurora, Colo., in a rented car and headed to New York to try to resolve an issue with a coffee cart that he said his family is licensed to operate in Lower Manhattan. A spokeswoman for the New York City health department could not confirm if the man or his father operated a mobile food cart.

Mr. Zazi said he was stopped at the George Washington Bridge by the authorities, who briefly detained him and searched his car. A city official confirmed that officers stopped a man at the bridge and searched his car, and that “everything was clean.” The official could not say what prompted the stop.

Mr. Zazi said he thought the police might be profiling him or suspected him because he has a beard and had rented the car. The next day, he said he thought his car had been stolen, but the police told him it had been towed. The following day, he said, he noticed he was being followed and called the police twice to complain.

Finally, he said, he cut short his stay in New York, deciding to fly back to Colorado on Saturday.

“It was too much for me,” Mr. Zazi said. “I said, ‘I can’t stay here, even for a minute.’ ”

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Cheney: Obama Policies Risk Catastrophic Terror Attacks

Former vice president Dick Cheney has warned that President Barack Obama’s anti-terror policies risk exposing the United States to a catastrophic nuclear or biological attack.

In his first interview since Obama’s inauguration, with Politico Tuesday, Cheney was unapologetic about the bitter controversies surrounding his own influential role in president George W. Bush’s “war on terror.”

Cheney said Obama would regret his commitment to closing down the Guantanamo Bay internment camp and ending harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects.

“These are evil people. And we’re not going to win this fight by turning the other cheek,” he said in the interview, conducted at an office near Cheney’s new home in Washington’s Virginia suburbs.

He said the “ultimate threat” facing the country since the September 11 attacks of 2001 was if extremists can unleash “a nuclear weapon or a biological agent of some kind” in the center of a US city.

“That’s the one that would involve the deaths of perhaps hundreds of thousands of people, and the one you have to spend a hell of a lot of time guarding against,” Cheney said.

“I think there’s a high probability of such an attempt,” he added.

“Whether or not they can pull it off depends whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.”

Source

Report – Al Qaeda Unconventional Weapons Experiment Kills 40 Operatives

An al Qaeda affiliate in Algeria closed a base earlier this month after an experiment with unconventional weapons went awry, a senior U.S. intelligence official said Monday.

The official, who spoke on the condition he not be named because of the sensitive nature of the issue, said he could not confirm press reports that the accident killed at least 40 al Qaeda operatives, but he said the mishap led the militant group to shut down a base in the mountains of Tizi Ouzou province in eastern Algeria.

He said authorities in the first week of January intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.

“We don’t know if this is biological or chemical,” the official said.

The story was first reported by the British tabloid the Sun, which said the al Qaeda operatives died after being infected with a strain of bubonic plague, the disease that killed a third of Europe’s population in the 14th century. But the intelligence official dismissed that claim.

via Source.

The Sun – Terrorists Killed By Own Black Death Experiment

The terrorists planned to wreak havoc on Western targets but fell victims to their own weapon, a leading expert on chemical warfare believes.

The Sun revealed yesterday that Black Death, also called the Plague, killed at least 40 fanatics at a terror training camp in Algeria earlier this month.

It was thought they caught the disease through poor living conditions in their forest hideouts.

But Dr Igor Khrupinov, of Georgia University, said: “Al-Qaeda is known to experiment with biological weapons. And this group has direct communication with other cells around the world.

“Contagious diseases, like ebola and anthrax, occur in northern Africa. It makes sense that people are trying to use them against Western governments.”

Dr Khrupinov, once arms adviser to Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev, added: “Instead of using bombs, people with infectious diseases could be walking through cities.”

Black Death has been researched as a biological weapon before.

Source

Is WMD Attack Inevitable?

Earlier this week Vice President elect Joseph Biden was briefed on the just released study by the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism that a WMD attack was likely sooner than later and that the supposed “margin of safety” was narrowing. The “top line” of the report is that while terrorist groups with al Qaeda still being the prime concern and suspect lacked the technical capabilities to actually make the weapon, the ability to find cooperating scientists could enable such an attack is increasing. Further, the Commission warned that all roads lead to Pakistan when it comes to weaponizing a WMD. Specifically, the Mumbai attacks last week, of necessity, raise the specter of an attack being planned and launched from inside of Pakistan, and more specifically, from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

In a sense, the release of this new government report, is new, but it is not necessarily news. The warnings about bio-terrorism have been a part of a clarion call since November 3, 2003 when an unclassified CIA Report discussed the risks inherent in the super-accelerated biotechnology sector. The earlier report, “The Darker Bioweapons Future” went just so far. If told us that the fear was the proliferation of weapons, of labs going research and of the growing number of people engaged in the science of developing new “bugs” so that countermeasures could be developed. They talked about the development of elixirs of combinations of a mild pathogen with its antidote a virulent mixture; or of designer pathogens designed to challenge existing antidotes to force the development of new ones; or most scary, a stealth virus that could lie dormant until triggered. What “The Darker Bioweapons Future” did not cover was the possibility of scientists becoming turncoats and offering weapons skills and capabilities to terrorists, and that the origin of the threat might be in Pakistan. Frankly, it took the passage of a few years and some history to conclude that the threat might be real, and that the enemy might lie in the guise of a lab coat. In 2003, no one really considered the possibility that a scientist might “go to the dark side.”

Some of the highlights and recommendations of the report to take away from the report were:

- Nuclear and biological weapons are proliferating: Yes, indeed, they are. The question of course relates to their availability to access of terrorists organizations to them. The statement that as proliferation continues that more countries come into possession the more likely a nefarious end occurs, is obviously true.

Source

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Panel Fears Use of Biological, Nuclear or Other Unconventional Weapon By 2013

An independent commission has concluded that terrorists will most likely carry out an attack with biological, nuclear or other unconventional weapons somewhere in the world in the next five years unless the United States and its allies act urgently to prevent that.

In a report to be released this week, the Congressionally mandated panel found that with countries like Iran and North Korea pursuing nuclear weapons programs, and with the risk of poorly secured biological pathogens growing, unconventional threats are fast outpacing the defenses arrayed to confront them. Read more

Are Terrorists Plotting New Attacks On US and Europe?

UPDATE: There’s been a number of rumors over the past several months that terrorists may use the ‘lull’ between the election and the new President entering office to launch an attack either on US soil or against US interests.

In course with a number of al Qaeda’s manifests of targeting the west, the current financial crisis may instigate attacks that will target some aspect of financial importance whether it be maritime shipping lines, any one of the world-wide stock exchanges, physical financial institutions, energy sources (oil) or other infrastructure. Read more

Terror Expert: WMD Attack on U.S. Inevitable Next Four To Five Years

A major terrorist attack on the United States, probably featuring a weapon of mass destruction, is inevitable during the next four to five years, says Marvin J. Cetron, the futurist who predicted 9/11 with alarming insight.

During an exclusive interview Cetron said the attack could come in as little as two and a half to three years.

Cetron, who startled and embarrassed the intelligence community with his study Terror 2000,has let the genie out of the bottle again with his latest report, 55 Trends Now Shaping the Future of Terrorism. Read more

WMD Panel Warns Of Biological Threats

The next U.S. president should put more emphasis on countering biological threats as part of a rethinking of national security strategy, according to early assessments from the leaders of a commission investigating the threat from weapons of mass destruction.

Both biological and nuclear threats are significant in their ability to kill hundreds of thousands, but a biological attack is easier to launch and harder to combat because many biological weapon components are widely available and have benign uses, said the commission’s chairman, former Sen. Bob Graham of Florida. Read more

A Ticking Radioactive Time Bomb

Since the end of the cold war, the United Nations has logged more than 800 incidents in which radioactive material has gone missing, often from poorly guarded sites. Who is taking it – and should we be worried?

A little before dawn on a recent summer morning, a convoy of three large blue lorries, a handful of police cars and a bus rumbled along the dual carriageway heading north out of the Bulgarian capital, Sofia. Even if it had not been so early, the motorcade would probably not have drawn much attention. The lorries were unmarked, the bus carrying a few sleepy policemen was old and scruffy, while the lumbering shipment was big and slow enough to explain the escort and its flashing blue lights. Read more

Georgia: Terror Fears Over Whereabouts Of Region’s Nuclear Material

When the breakaway region of Abkhazia split from Georgia in 1993, the world’s only known case of enriched uranium going missing was reported after up to 2kg of the potentially devastating material was stolen from a laboratory.

There are now fears that the organized criminal gangs that are rife in the region could exploit the confusion of the current conflict to loot other stocks. Read more