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Al-Qaeda Building Online Training Library
The al-Qaeda terrorist organization and related groups are constructing an online library of training materials that includes biological weapons recipes, the Washington Post reported Sunday (see GSN, Jan. 14). The number of radical Islamic Web sites has exploded since Sept. 11, 2001, said Gabriel Weimann, a professor at the University of Haifa in Israel. Weimann began tracking such sites eight years ago, when he found a total of 12. He is now following more than 4,500, the Post reported. “They are all linked indirectly through association of belief, belonging to some community. The Internet is the network that connects them all,” Weimann said. Online topics range from producing the toxin ricin to using commercial chemicals to make a bomb, according to the Post. One 15-page Web document in Arabic, titled “Biological Weapons,” describes “how the pneumonic plague could be made into a biological weapon,” from just a small sample of a virus culture, according to a translation by Rebecca Givner-Forbes, an analyst at the Terrorism Research Center. The manual uses information obtained from World War II-era U.S. and Japanese biological weapons programs and demonstrates “how to inject carrier animals, like rats, with the virus and how to extract microbes from infected blood … and how to dry them so that they can be used with an aerosol delivery system” (Coll/Glasser, Washington Post, Aug. 7).
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