The FBI and the CIA were able to identify, find and arrest Jose Padilla, who is believed to have planned to detonate a “dirty bomb” within the United States, in less than three weeks after first receiving information, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, June 10).
Although critics have charged since the Sept. 11 attacks that the FBI and CIA are unable to cooperate with each other, the arrest of Padilla, also known as Abdullah al-Muhajir, demonstrated that the two agencies can work together, officials said (see GSN, June 5).
“Things moved very quickly and it went back and forth (between agencies) as we pieced this together,” a senior FBI official said yesterday. “We always worked together,” added a senior intelligence official. “We are just more focused now.”
U.S. authorities first learned about the dirty bomb plot during an interrogation session with captured al-Qaeda commander Abu Zubaydah in April, an official said (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, June 11). Zubaydah told authorities that several al-Qaeda operatives last year had proposed creating a dirty bomb, according to the New York Times (see GSN, April 24). While Zubaydah did not identify Padilla by name, he did provide enough information to allow the CIA to check with other sources and to narrow the search, officials said.
“We were able to figure out who Zubaydah was talking about, and then screen him and follow him,” a U.S. intelligence official said (Risen/Shenon, New York Times, June 11).
Zubaydah also told U.S. authorities that there was a second man interested in detonating a radiological weapon within the United States, according to the Washington Post. The second man, identified as a Pakistani, has already been taken into custody in Pakistan for travel document violations, a Bush administration source said.
Authorities are still unsure why Zubaydah provided such helpful information, the Post reported (see GSN, May 23). It is possible that he did not believe U.S. authorities would be able to deduce the identities of the two plotters, according to the Post.
“We still can’t figure his game,” a U.S. official said. “He does not want to be helpful” (Pincus, Washington Post).
On the Hunt
FBI and CIA agents began tracking Padilla when Pakistani authorities detained him and two other men because of a passport violation in April, officials said. Padilla then left Pakistan and traveled from Switzerland to Egypt and back to Switzerland, according to the New York Times.
To keep watch on him, FBI agents boarded a flight Padilla was taking from Zurich to the United States. Due to fears Padilla might try to disrupt the flight, the FBI agents asked airline security to inspect Padilla’s luggage and personal items, even his shoes, according to the Times.
“They checked to make sure his shoes weren’t funky,” said one official, referring to Richard Reed, a British man who was arrested during a trans-Atlantic flight last year for attempting to detonate a bomb built into his shoes.
In an attempt to gain Padilla’s cooperation, U.S. authorities arrested him when the flight landed in Chicago, officials said. Padilla, however, declined to cooperate with authorities during his incarceration last month at the Metropolitan Corrections Center in New York, said a New York law enforcement official (Risen/Shenon, New York Times).
Legal Status
Padilla has not yet been charged with any criminal violation, said a senior Justice Department official. Instead, he has been designated as an “enemy combatant,” which allows the U.S. military to detain him indefinitely, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Officials decided to classify Padilla as an enemy combatant because a hearing on his case is scheduled to be heard today, said a person familiar with the case. Prosecutors have been concerned that they do not have enough evidence for a strong case and that a judge will order Padilla’s release, the person said, adding that there is substantial evidence that Padilla planned to detonate a radiological weapon.
“It seems clear he was dead-set on making this happen. Whether he was going to be successful is hard to say,” the source said. “This guy is unique, sort of an East meets West. He spent half his life as a dangerous Chicago gangster, then he becomes al-Qaeda. He combines the American street tough savvy with the single-mindedness of al-Qaeda.”
The United States is basing its classification of Padilla largely on two World War II cases that allowed U.S. citizens to be classified as enemy belligerents, said Deputy Attorney General Larry Thompson. Civil rights advocates, however, have expressed some criticism.
“I find it troubling that, once again, as this administration supposedly fights for American values abroad, it finds those values disposable at home,” said Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.), the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee (Wall Street Journal, June 11).
The fact that Padilla is a U.S. citizen might make it difficult for the United States to limit his access to a lawyer and to detain him without a trial, according to specialists in international law.
“It’s going to be hard for the government to keep holding this guy,” said Peter Spiro, an international law professor at Hofstra University. “This is a case that poses a new designation for which there is no clear precedent: the ‘enemy combatant’ who is also a U.S. citizen.”
Padilla cannot be tried by military tribunals created after the Sept. 11 attacks because U.S. citizens are barred from being defendants at such trials, according to the Post.
Ruth Wedgwood, a Yale University international law expert, however, said there is clear legal support for holding Padilla as an enemy combatant.
Under international law, “if you’ve declared yourself an adversary of the U.S., then that’s an entirely different legal paradigm,” she said (John Mintz, Washington Post, June 11).
Material Could Have Been Domestic
Meanwhile, Padilla’s plans to build and detonate a radiological weapon inside the United States might have relied on obtaining domestic radioactive materials, according to U.S. counterterrorism officials (see GSN, May 6).
Al-Qaeda possesses a small stockpile of radioactive material — probably still located in Central or South Asia — officials said, but analysts believe that suspected terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden probably would not risk transporting his supply across U.S. borders, according to the Washington Post.
“It is much more likely they will acquire them in the United States if they want to use them here,” said a senior official. “They will try to obtain them locally.”
While U.S. weapon-grade nuclear materials are securely stored, the level of security is much lower for radioactive materials that would be sufficient for a radiological weapon, the Post reported. U.S. companies have lost track of about 1,500 radioactive parts since 1996, with more than half never recovered, according to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that as many as 30,000 radioactive parts have been discarded or abandoned.
One incident that has concerned investigators is the 1998 theft of 19 tubes of medical cesium from a North Carolina hospital, according to the Post. Authorities believe that the theft was committed with inside help, and even after an intensive search the cesium has never been found, according to Johnnie James, radiation emergency coordinator for North Carolina’s Radiation Protection Section.
The radiation that makes industrial cesium such an attractive radiological weapon, however, also poses an immense risk to would-be thieves, said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (see related GSN story, today).
“It’s not difficult to get a hold of this stuff, but if they don’t know what they are doing, they could easily kill themselves,” he said (Barton Gellman, Washington Post, June 11).
Israel Safe From Attack, Peres Says
In Israel today, Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said his country faces little risk of a terrorist attack involving a dirty bomb. Israeli officials are concerned that Palestinian militants are attempting to use more advanced attacks, according to Ha’aretz (see GSN, June 6).
“It is very difficult to create a bomb of this kind and equally difficult to use one,” Peres said (Ha’aretz, June 11).
A radiological bomb — or “dirty bomb” — would probably cause few fatalities, but the ease of building such a bomb and its potential to spark panic has raised concerns, according to reports (see related GSN story, today).
Some people could be killed in the initial conventional blast from a dirty bomb —consisting of conventional explosives laced with radioactive substances — but few would die from the spread of radioactive material, experts said (see GSN, Dec. 5, 2001). A blast would spread the material but also disperse it to the point that a person would be very unlikely to be subjected to lethal doses of radiation, said John Poston, a nuclear engineering professor at Texas A&M University.
More might die, however, from “people panicking, killing each other in automobiles, arguing over who has the right way,” Poston said.
According to a report from the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a 4,000-pound TNT bomb laced with 1« pounds of radioactive cesium detonated in front of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum in Washington could contaminate an area in which tens of thousands of people live and work. The bomb, however, would add only 25 percent to the amount of radiation people receive from normal activities (Matthew Wald, New York Times, June 11).
According to the model on which the report is based, such a bomb would contaminate 20 percent of downtown Washington, but only people in the blocks closest to the explosion would be at risk for increased rates of cancer or cataracts.
A radiological bomb detonated in downtown Washington or New York would cause few if any immediate deaths, but panicked people might overburden health-care systems and city blocks might be abandoned for decades, experts said. More people might be exposed to radiation from people fleeing the area of the blast, said Phil Anderson of CSIS.
Despite concern among U.S. officials, emergency responders were “clearly not prepared to deal with” radiation discovered near a bomb blast, according to the CSIS study.
Might Be Easy to Use …
Building a radiological bomb would be much easier than obtaining a nuclear weapon, analysts said. Security is much more relaxed around the many sources of radiological materials, such as medical and food irradiation equipment, than around nuclear weapons (see GSN, May 10).
In some states, there is no inventory of radioactive materials, the Los Angeles Times reported (Willman/Munn, Los Angeles Times, June 11). According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, there were 107 reports of lost or stolen radiation sources in the six months ending March 31 (see GSN, May 6).
“The dirty bomb is something that is so easy to execute, I could go so far as to say I believe that one person who has done their homework, acting alone today, could do significant damage, certainly more psychological than real,” Anderson said (Wald, New York Times).
“There’s no question in my mind that terrorists could, fairly readily, find some radiological material that they may wish to use,” William Potter of the Monterey Institute of International Studies said. “It is easer than I previously believed. And with the knowledge and the motivation of terrorists, that has me uneasy” (Willman/Munn, Los Angeles Times).
… Maybe Not
Some analysts, however, said practical problems would pose obstacles to potential terrorists wishing to build dirty bombs. Some radiation sources are shielded and very heavy, and some food irradiation devices weight 10,000 pounds. Terrorists could remove the shields to significantly reduce weight but would expose themselves to enough radiation to kill them before they could use the device, some analysts said.
Radioactive materials would be “difficult to handle and difficult to disperse” but might cause “terrible economic damage,” said Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research (Wald, New York Times).
The public interest organization Environmental Working Group yesterday launched a Web site that provides detailed information on potential nuclear waste transportation routes to the proposed Yucca Mountain repository in Nevada (see GSN, June 7).
The online maps highlight areas within one mile of routes in red and areas within two miles in yellow. The Web site also details the number of schools and hospitals in each area and the numbers of truck and railroad transportation accidents.
Information on the waste shipment routes is based on data contained within the Energy Department’s environmental impact statement on the Yucca Mountain plan, according to the Associated Press. Yucca Mountain opponents have said that Energy has not provided the public with enough information on how nuclear waste will be shipped to the proposed repository (see GSN, May 22).
“They want to keep the public in the dark,” said Mike Casey of the Environmental Working Group. “We think the public should be given a chance to weigh in on their (transportation) plan.”
Energy has not yet decided what routes nuclear waste shipments will take to the Yucca Mountain repository if and when it is constructed, said department spokesman Joe Davis. Once shipments begin, “the actual routes will be classified” and will be developed with input from state and local officials, he said.
Energy has no objections to the Environmental Working Group’s Web site, Davis said, “as long as it reflects the facts and doesn’t try to scare anybody” (Associated Pre\ss/Baltimore Sun, June 11).
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