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From: Sent: Sunday, October 30, 2005 5:21 AM To: Bruce Tefft Subject: Fwd: Re: 'WMD terrorism': Sum of all fears doesn't always add up I have no trust in Hanley. He was the scum leader of three AP reporters who misinterpreted the No Gun Ri incident in the Korean War into a massive US war crime. His American co-author was a leftist graduate of UC Santa Cruz and his Korean counterpart started the thing off by taking and advancing the claims of a communist sympathizer. Just to show you how biased and slanted this story is, he minimizes it throughout and never tells you that the plot was al-Zarqawi's. You are also told nothing of the sarin found in a shell in an IED in Iraq last year, and it is never mentioned that Syria is one of two countries suspected of harboring the large quantitries of chemical weapons smuggled out or Iraq just befroe the invasion. That is no myth. He is also factually incorrect in his comments about chemical weapons. You do not have to inhale sarin or VX, just get a pinprick drop on your skin and it will absorb through. If he thinks chlorine isn't deadly, let him explain why fire departments are so concerned when pool chemical storage facilities are involved in fires, or why people are evacuated when tanker cars with the stuff derail. And "mustard" is not an agent. It is a blister agent and it has the name "mustard." As for "degraded" condition of chemical weapons being destroyed, he needs to check his facts again. The shells and seals have degraded, but the contents are still deadly. That is why there is such fear and so many precautions related to the incineration of these rounds. He ought to talk to workers who were exposed when these rounds leaked during the de-mil process, and ask them if they had nothing to fear. I can't tell if Hanley is just an incompetent liar or if he is actually working against the interests of this country but I have never seen a completely accurate story written by him, and I guarantee that I have never seen anything closely resembling a supportive account of our military and its actions. Oh, and as for the thousands exposed in Tokyo and how only 12-13 died, that is because they did not WANT a large death toll. The method of delivery was wrong. They wanted to threaten. If you kill a dozen, people don't push for a huge investigation. If you kill thousands, they will demand a full investigation, and that would have led them to North Korea. North Korea was linked to this case and the attack was designed not to kill but to demonstrate to the Japanese government how vulnerable it was. North Korea had been forced to back down in 1994 on its nuclear plans and they knew that US airpower in Japan would get them just as it did in 1950. But, if war broke out and the Japanese refused US takeoff rights, the result would be drastically different. It was a warning: support the US and pay the price. The guy doesn't know what the hell he is talking about--which is common for him R Posted 10/29/2005 11:48 PM 'WMD terrorism': Sum of all fears doesn't always add up By Charles J. Hanley, Associated Press Special Correspondent AMMAN, Jordan - After the warehouse raid in northern Jordan, the word from authorities horrified the people of Amman. Terrorists linked to al-Qaeda had assembled a fearsome array of chemicals and planned a bombing that would send a 2-mile-wide "poison cloud" over this Middle East capital, killing as many as 80,000 people, military prosecutors said. Osama bin Laden's foot soldiers had finally concocted a weapon of mass destruction. A year later, in the hard light of scientific scrutiny, that sinister scenario looks more fictional than factual. "Eighty thousand! That would have been like Hiroshima. And that was an atomic bomb," says Samih Khreis, one of the alleged plotters' lawyers. The defense attorneys aren't alone in scoffing at the "WMD" claim. International experts checking the suspects' supposed list of chemicals - from the industrial compound ammonium to the explosive nitroglycerin - say either the defendants or the Jordanian authorities, or both, had little inkling about the makings of a chemical weapon. The compounds "may generate some toxic byproducts, but they're unlikely to result in significant deaths by poisoning," said Ron G. Manley of Britain, a former senior U.N. adviser on chemical weapons. The poison cloud of Amman is one more dubious episode in the story of the terrorist quest for doomsday arms, a dark vision that has become an axiom of today's counterterrorist strategy. Four years into the "global war on terror," half the Americans surveyed this summer said they worry "a lot" about the possibility of such a WMD attack, according to the U.S. polling firm Public Agenda. Concerns emerged in the 1990s when the Soviet Union's collapse left nuclear and other arms vulnerable to theft. Worries grew as "recipes" for mass-casualty weapons flashed around the Internet. In 1998, al-Qaeda leader bin Laden told Time magazine that acquiring such arms to defend Muslims "is a religious duty." Three years later in Afghanistan, the U.S. military found al-Qaeda documents, crude equipment and other evidence of chemical and biological experimentation. al-Qaeda's intent is clear, says a key U.S. intelligence analyst. "The intent is there and you can see it in the 'fatwas' justifying the use" of WMD, Donald Van Duyn of the FBI's Counterterrorism Division said in a Washington interview. One fatwa, or Muslim religious decree, issued by radical Saudi cleric Nasser al-Fahd in 2003 at bin Laden's request, "authorized" the use of ultimate weapons "if the infidels can be repelled from the Muslims only by using such weapons." "It may be only a matter of time before al-Qaeda or another group attempts to use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear weapons," CIA Director Porter Goss advised U.S. senators earlier this year. Amid all the warnings, boasts and chilling tales, however, the daunting difficulties of fielding such weapons usually go unmentioned - along with al-Qaeda's glaring lack of expertise and stable home base, the unreliability of Internet "formulas," and the progress made worldwide in locking down the raw materials of the most destructive arms. Amman's is one of many stories of exaggerated threats or ill-conceived plans. Others include: . British police last year arrested eight people on suspicion of plotting a bombing that would spread osmium tetroxide, a dangerous corrosive compound. But this volatile chemical would have burned up in any explosion, scientists say. . The long-jailed Jose Padilla, an American al-Qaeda member accused of planning a radioactive "dirty bomb" in the United States, is said by U.S. officials to have hoped to use uranium. But uranium has low radioactivity, and would have had no more impact than lead in a bomb, scientists note. . Eight Algerian and Libyan defendants accused of "conspiracy to manufacture chemical weapons" were freed in London last April after authorities acknowledged tests showed a substance found in one of their apartments was not highly lethal ricin, as earlier alleged. The plant extract, effective as a poison dealt to individuals, was long ago dismissed by military arms-makers as an impractical mass-casualty weapon. . American WMD specialists in Iraq reported that insurgents there last year recruited a Baghdad chemist to make the blistering agent mustard, a chemical weapon developed in World War I. They said he had the right ingredients, but he couldn't produce the compound. The only known terrorist use of a chemical weapon occurred in 1995 in the Tokyo subway system, when Aum Shinrikyo cult members punctured plastic bags of sarin, unleashing nerve-agent vapor that felled thousands of commuters. The cult, including scientists, is believed to have spent millions of dollars on the demanding, dangerous production process, but came up with only impure sarin. It killed 12 people - hardly a mass-fatality terror attack, specialists point out. "Regardless of what people say, this is very difficult to do, to inflict mass casualties with chemical or biological weapons," said Jonathan Tucker, an authority on unconventional arms with California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. "One really needs large quantities." CHEMICAL TERROR In a 2004 study, the U.S. Congressional Research Service analyzed barriers terrorists would face trying to use specific chemicals as weapons. Examples: VX - Even in small amounts, this potentially lethal nerve agent, developed as a chemical weapon, can affect large numbers of people through inhalation or skin contact. But obtaining its precursor chemicals and making the compound would be very difficult. SARIN - This potentially lethal nerve agent and traditional chemical weapon is difficult to make, though somewhat less so than VX. It must be inhaled and its victims would be more readily treatable than those of VX. CHLORINE - This industrial chemical would be easy to acquire and can cause serious lung damage. But it is rarely lethal, and large volumes of it must be inhaled to do harm. Oregon toxicologist Dr. Robert Hendrickson calculates that terrorists would need 1,900 pounds of sarin - more than 200 gallons - to kill half the people in a typical open-air baseball stadium. So much liquid, with dispersal devices, would be extremely difficult to conceal and to produce, probably taking 10 years in a basement-sized operation, experts say. Thousands of tons of sarin and VX nerve agent already exist, in old U.S., Russian and other military arsenals. But those weapons' potency has degraded and they're being destroyed under the 1997 treaty banning them. Security around the storage sites has been tightened since the Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. terror attacks. If true chemical weapons prove beyond their reach, experts say, terrorists may turn to far less lethal but more available pesticides and caustic compounds. Large amounts of sulfuric acid, the "battery acid" for sale at $2 a gallon on the Internet, were among the Jordanian group's chemicals. "Terrorists are opportunistic," Tucker said of that group's motley collection. "They apparently figured it would produce some toxic mess that would do some harm." The prime target in Amman was Jordan's General Intelligence Department, prosecutors said. Defense attorneys said the men admit planning a bombing, but their cache didn't include ammonium, potassium nitrate and some other compounds mentioned by prosecutors. A televised "confession" to a chemical plot by alleged bombmaker Azmi al-Jayousi was coerced, said lawyer Khreis, who contended Jordan's U.S.-aligned government was exaggerating the threat because "they want approval of people in the street and of Parliament for their anti-terror actions." Military prosecutors, who wouldn't discuss the case on the record, claim a toxic cloud killed rabbits in the desert in a test explosion of the purported chemical cache. A Jordanian army chemical expert recently testified, however, that only considerable expertise and equipment could produce a mass killer from the mix. "A chemical bomb needs a qualified chemist," Khreis said. "Al-Jayousi has a 6th-grade education." Some analysts say the facts of chemistry may mean little in the end for those who want to terrorize populations, as long as the word "chemical" is heard on air or seen in headlines. "One needs only to look at the adjectives used by the media to describe chemicals to understand why the general public is frightened: toxic, killer, lethal, deadly," said Hendrickson, of the Oregon Health and Science University. Whether Internet "recipes" work or not, said the FBI's Van Duyn, "I'm not sure they need to be very effective." Copyright 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. [Non-text portions of this message have been removed] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Get fast access to your favorite Yahoo! 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