by John Thompson
04/26/04
There is an aphorism that is frightening, for all that it is true: For the US Secret Service, a would-be Presidential assassin only has to be lucky once in a while, his body guards have to be lucky all the time. The same is true for the terrorist who seeks to launch a really vicious attack — in order to kill people by the thousands (or tens of thousands), he only has to be lucky once, the security forces of the Free World need to be lucky all the time.
The US Secret Service, like most professionals in the military and security services are used to making their luck stretch as far as competence and professionalism can make it. Luck is something you have to make for yourself, but even manufactured luck can only stretch so far. We have been very lucky in the long months since 9-11, but it won’t last forever.
On April 17th, the Jordanians announced that Palestinians associated with al Qaeda had been arrested while driving three vehicles into Amman Jordan. The vehicles contained enough of the primary materials for making a massive chemical bomb that could have killed "20,000 people and contaminated a large area". The area planned for the release of the bomb, once it was assembled, included the offices of the Jordanian Prime Minister, the General Intelligence Department and the US Embassy. Incidentally, the Jordanian police pointed out that the vehicles had come from Syria.
At the end of January in Baghdad, US troops found a three kilogram block of cyanide salt in a safe-house belonging to Abu Musah Zarqawi, the Al Qaeda poison specialist who acted as a go-between for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. Cyanide salts are extremely toxic and form the basis for a number of startlingly poisonous weapons.
On March 30th, British police scooped up ten suspected members of al Qaeda in London (and the RCMP arrested Mohammad Momin Khawaja, 29, in Ottawa in connection with the case). The group had acquired half a ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer --the base for a number of improvised explosives — and had been looking for means to use it in some crowded area of London. They were also discussing trying to find stocks of osmium tetroxide as an additional casualty causing agent (it doesn’t vaporize when in an explosion) that wouldn’t be noticed for hours after an explosion — until rescue workers started going blind and coughing up their lungs.
The recent release of "do-it-yourself" Jihadist training materials by al Qaeda is already having some effects. At the end of March, German police arrested an armed man as he was about to enter a Frankfurt discotheque in the city with a gun and two improvised bombs. Interestingly, he was one of the many European converts to Islam that al Qaeda has placed a high emphasis on recruiting in the last two years. Three weeks ago, another do-it-yourself attempt came apart in Milan; when an Islamic militant wired up seventy propane tanks in his car for an attempted suicide bombing — but the improvised attack went off on a highway, only incinerating the driver.
On April 5th, in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings, French police scooped 13 suspected members of the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (an al Qaeda subset) including one about to flee the country in a series of dawn raids. The French cells to the group were wanted in connection with the deadly terrorist attacks in Casablanca in May of 2003.
Last January, French police also scooped up an al Qaeda cell in their search for Menad Benchellali’s stores of biological weapons. An al Qaeda chemical weapons expert, Benchellali had stored the botulin and ricin toxins at his home although no traces had been found so far. The French and British are nervous after finding that ricin had been produced by al Qaeda members in England last year, but have no idea where the stocks produced in a raided improvised lab have disappeared.
The Italians are nervous again too — after finding another videotaped threat against Rome inside an al Qaeda safehouse in Cremona early this April. The tape was from Sheikh Abu Qatadah Al Falastini, a Jordanian and suspect Al-Qaeda who was being held in prison in Britain. It said : "The person who will destroy Rome is already preparing his swords. Rome will not be conquered by words but by force and weapons … Rome is the cross and the West is the cross. And the people of Rome are the patrons of the cross. Muslims' target is the West." The Vatican and Rome were already heavily guarded last Christmas in response to a planned suicide attack, and the measures were effected for Easter.
Added to these are dozens of other reports of reconnaissance trips, of the training of Jihadist recruits inside Europe and North America, and attempts to acquire explosives and toxins. We have been lucky so far, but we can’t be lucky forever…
John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca
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