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| Terror Networks & Islam |
| Totally in the dark on al-Qaeda |
| 2005-04-03 |
| The WMD commission also blasted the intelligence community's failings on the al Qaeda terrorist organization. It was only after the invasion of Afghanistan, the panel says, that analysts understood the scope of Osama bin Laden's programs to develop biological and nuclear weapons. The analysts' most weighty prewar judgment--that al Qaeda lacked a nuclear device--was "made in the absence of any hard data." But most troubling, the report suggests, is the lack of knowledge about a biological weapon referred to in the unclassified version only as "Agent X," which sources tell U.S. News was a strain of anthrax. Hints of al Qaeda experimenting with anthrax have been reported before, but the report reveals an official assessment that the group "probably" acquired "at least a small quantity of this virulent strain and had plans to assemble devices to disperse the agent." The program was based at several sites in Afghanistan, two of them stocked with commercial lab gear and staffed by operatives "with special training." At the center of the activity, sources say, was Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian Army captain who had studied biochemistry at a state college in California. Sufaat allegedly created several front companies for al Qaeda and its Malaysian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah. Ominously, the report warns that questions remain about al Qaeda's WMD efforts that can be answered only by improving spy operations. But the commission also says that counterterrorism efforts could be jeopardized by a "bitter" bureaucratic turf battle between the new joint FBI-CIA National Counterterrorism Center and the CIA's own Counterterrorism Center. Amid confusion over responsibilities, the two agencies have competed for resources and issued overlapping, sometimes inconsistent, warnings. The report concludes the new national intelligence director "will have to force the nation's counterterrorism organizations to concentrate more fully on fighting terrorists, rather than each other." |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |