Terrorist WMD Threat Persists

By Jon Fox
Global Security Newswire

WASHINGTON — A senior U.S. Defense Department official renewed the intelligence community’s assessment yesterday that al-Qaeda will continue to seek chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear materials for use in attacks (see GSN, July 17).

Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence James Clapper repeated the warning contained in the unclassified summary of the recent National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism but did not indicate how close al-Qaeda might be to acquiring such material.

Al-Qaeda is pursuing unconventional weapons and would certainly use any it acquires, he said.  “We must be prepared for the unthinkable even if such an event would be unacceptable.”

“Al-Qaeda has and will continue to attempt visually dramatic mass casualty attacks here at home,” Clapper told a joint session of the House armed services and intelligence committees.

While the intelligence estimate indicated al-Qaeda would intensify efforts to place operatives inside the United States, officials yesterday clarified that the group has as yet been unable to establish terror cells within the country.

Edward Gistaro, an officer in the office of the director of national intelligence, told lawmakers the “FBI does not see al-Qaeda figures here inside the United States with links back to the senior leadership at this time.”

“What the NIE talks about is our concern that we see increased efforts on the part of al-Qaeda to try and find, train and deploy people who could get into this country,” he said.

Clapper and Gistaro gave brief opening statements and fielded a number of questions about al-Qaeda’s presence in tribally controlled regions of Pakistan and the operations of al-Qaeda affiliates in Iraq.

While the subject of weapons of mass destruction was not addressed in the oral portion of the hearing, one-third of Clapper’s prepared testimony entered into the record focused on U.S. defenses against and response to an unconventional weapon attack.

Repeating that the “most likely” scenario is an al-Qaeda attack with conventional explosives, “the interest they have shown in weapons of mass destruction is real and needs to be taken seriously,” Clapper wrote. 

The rest of his testimony outlined the Defense Department’s WMD consequence management capabilities such as National Guard civil support teams and National Guard Chemical, Biological, Radiological and High-Yield Explosive Enhanced Response Force Packages.

These CERFP units, as they are called in the military’s acronym-heavy jargon, are designed to “fill the 6-72 hour gap” between the initial response to a WMD incident and the point at which the federal response would arrive.

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