THE DAILY CHEM BIO TERROR FEARMONGER: A White House advisor, naturally
"The likelihood that al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers will use chemical, biological and radiological weapons is growing, a counterterrorism adviser to the White House believes.
" 'For terrorists, the likelihood of using these weapons grows because they believe that they can have very significant and corrosive psychological impacts on society," Georgetown University's Bruce Hoffman told the [Australian newspaper known as the] Herald. He pointed to al-Qaeda's long history of pursuing unconventional weapons and recent trends in Iraq."
Your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow picked this article and subsequent context up over at Armchair Generalist.
Whenever the terror threat appears to be gathering flab because of utter disgust with Iraq, readers know there is never a shortage of experts at the beck and call of the US government to be called upon to put muscle back into it. And if this cannot immediately be done in domestic op-ed pieces, then the foreign English-speaking press is fair game, too.
Bruce Hoffman has been one of the war-on-terror experts good at the practice.
However, no matter the regard in which Hoffman may be held by the current US government, he needs to be taken with a shaker full of salt when assessing a CBRN threat from al Qaeda. Hoffman doesn't appear to know much about the practical misapplications of science which are involved and there is little or no evidence in his public writings that he's actually seen and understood terror chem/bio terror documents on the subject.
In February, Hoffman was also seen writing in the Los Angeles Times that al Qaeda was on the march. This opinion was a rehash of some testimony he'd delivered before Congress and if you read the footnotes from the original material, Hoffman tried to make his case from a number of incidents drawn from the terror beat in England.
For it, Hoffman referenced the old London ricin plot. This plot, though, was not the work of al Qaeda. It was the work of one loner and a jury trial subsequently cleared everyone else thought to be al Qaeda men. DD had the terror documents from it, the materials of Kamel Bourgass, the one convicted Algerian. Other terror original materials were made available to the Old Bailey court, recovered at al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan. They specifically addressed toxin and biologicals and it was the aim of the prosecution in the ricin case to link the men in the dock to al Qaeda by tieing the poison recipes of Kamel Bourgass to the al Qaeda originals.
This could not be done because they were not the same.
More pertinently, there was no significant savvy on chemical or biological weapons in any of these materials. In fact, they were childlike in nature.
For another example, Hoffman dragged in the case of Dhiren Barot, a crackpot who envisioned making a dirty bomb from smoke detectors and an another terror weapon from used exit signs.
Barot's computer files were put on the Net in heavily redacted form by London's Metropolitan Police and I went over them here.
These pieces of computer evidence were a shabby business and after their true nature was publicized, the Met Police pulled them from its website. (Note: I haven't yet decided where I'm going to put them back onto the net. Here, there, somewhere.)
Since then, DD has been the recipient of more chem and bioterror files recovered from jihadists, procured during investigations used to break up terror plots and subsequent prosecutions in England.
While the wishful intent of jihadists to obtain a chemical or biological weapon has remained constant since 9/11, it can also be said that, as far as can be determined from the documents, the jihadist savvy has also remained dreadfully poor. Which is good for us.
The young jihadi men have a tendency to recycle the same old texts over and over, making minor variations to their materials, depending on the personal vanity of the distributor.
One thing that does become clear from reading such documents. The jihadists who write and distribute them are very poorly educated. They have only the barest inklings of the sciences of chemistry and biology.
This reality is far more complicated than the often told simplistic pseudo-reality that al Qaeda men are working on the getting chemical and biological weapons. However, because the US mainstream media has virtually ignored taking an independent and critical look at actual terrorist documents, other than using selected photos and blurbs from them for shock value, the pseudo-reality remains ascendent.
Where terrorists do have abilities in weapons engineering is where they have hands-on experience. Like in Iraq. This, in turn, has extended a slim reed to which some current terror prognosticators cling.
The reasoning goes that since a handful of chlorine bombs have been used in Iraq, even though almost no chemical effect has been attributed to them, it illogically follows that this indicates a chemical WMD attack capability which will inevitably follow on in the United States.
Armchair Generalist states flatly that current predictive scenarious "completely ignore the actual capability of terrorists ..."
"The likelihood that al-Qaeda and its fellow travellers will use chemical, biological and radiological weapons is growing, a counterterrorism adviser to the White House believes.
" 'For terrorists, the likelihood of using these weapons grows because they believe that they can have very significant and corrosive psychological impacts on society," Georgetown University's Bruce Hoffman told the [Australian newspaper known as the] Herald. He pointed to al-Qaeda's long history of pursuing unconventional weapons and recent trends in Iraq."
Your friendly neighborhood GlobalSecurity.Org Senior Fellow picked this article and subsequent context up over at Armchair Generalist.
Whenever the terror threat appears to be gathering flab because of utter disgust with Iraq, readers know there is never a shortage of experts at the beck and call of the US government to be called upon to put muscle back into it. And if this cannot immediately be done in domestic op-ed pieces, then the foreign English-speaking press is fair game, too.
Bruce Hoffman has been one of the war-on-terror experts good at the practice.
However, no matter the regard in which Hoffman may be held by the current US government, he needs to be taken with a shaker full of salt when assessing a CBRN threat from al Qaeda. Hoffman doesn't appear to know much about the practical misapplications of science which are involved and there is little or no evidence in his public writings that he's actually seen and understood terror chem/bio terror documents on the subject.
In February, Hoffman was also seen writing in the Los Angeles Times that al Qaeda was on the march. This opinion was a rehash of some testimony he'd delivered before Congress and if you read the footnotes from the original material, Hoffman tried to make his case from a number of incidents drawn from the terror beat in England.
For it, Hoffman referenced the old London ricin plot. This plot, though, was not the work of al Qaeda. It was the work of one loner and a jury trial subsequently cleared everyone else thought to be al Qaeda men. DD had the terror documents from it, the materials of Kamel Bourgass, the one convicted Algerian. Other terror original materials were made available to the Old Bailey court, recovered at al Qaeda hideouts in Afghanistan. They specifically addressed toxin and biologicals and it was the aim of the prosecution in the ricin case to link the men in the dock to al Qaeda by tieing the poison recipes of Kamel Bourgass to the al Qaeda originals.
This could not be done because they were not the same.
More pertinently, there was no significant savvy on chemical or biological weapons in any of these materials. In fact, they were childlike in nature.
For another example, Hoffman dragged in the case of Dhiren Barot, a crackpot who envisioned making a dirty bomb from smoke detectors and an another terror weapon from used exit signs.
Barot's computer files were put on the Net in heavily redacted form by London's Metropolitan Police and I went over them here.
These pieces of computer evidence were a shabby business and after their true nature was publicized, the Met Police pulled them from its website. (Note: I haven't yet decided where I'm going to put them back onto the net. Here, there, somewhere.)
Since then, DD has been the recipient of more chem and bioterror files recovered from jihadists, procured during investigations used to break up terror plots and subsequent prosecutions in England.
While the wishful intent of jihadists to obtain a chemical or biological weapon has remained constant since 9/11, it can also be said that, as far as can be determined from the documents, the jihadist savvy has also remained dreadfully poor. Which is good for us.
The young jihadi men have a tendency to recycle the same old texts over and over, making minor variations to their materials, depending on the personal vanity of the distributor.
One thing that does become clear from reading such documents. The jihadists who write and distribute them are very poorly educated. They have only the barest inklings of the sciences of chemistry and biology.
This reality is far more complicated than the often told simplistic pseudo-reality that al Qaeda men are working on the getting chemical and biological weapons. However, because the US mainstream media has virtually ignored taking an independent and critical look at actual terrorist documents, other than using selected photos and blurbs from them for shock value, the pseudo-reality remains ascendent.
Where terrorists do have abilities in weapons engineering is where they have hands-on experience. Like in Iraq. This, in turn, has extended a slim reed to which some current terror prognosticators cling.
The reasoning goes that since a handful of chlorine bombs have been used in Iraq, even though almost no chemical effect has been attributed to them, it illogically follows that this indicates a chemical WMD attack capability which will inevitably follow on in the United States.
Armchair Generalist states flatly that current predictive scenarious "completely ignore the actual capability of terrorists ..."
posted by George Smith at 1:00 PM
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