This post, like most on this blog is at least a week too late but I feel like all of the chatter on the “AQIM operatives killed by plague” is turning into one of these slightly dubious, only on the internet kind of stories, that deserves a little slightly more sober analysis. As far as I am concerned there is scant evidence to substantiate any of the claims made by either of the two “newspapers” that have reported on this issue and most of the blog postings I have read on the subject seem to be so far off the mark as to be laughable.
In case you missed it the Sun tabloid (famous for its page three girls) first reported on Jan. 19th that around 40 members of AQIM were killed when some kind of experimentation with a “biological or chemical” weapon went awry. You can see the original article here. According to the Sun article (which refers to AQIM as AQLIM somewhat oddly) an AQIM operative contracted bubonic plague (the disease we all remember from European History). To support this claim the Sun quotes from “sources” about the supposed incident. While I mostly restrain my snobby impulses if you’re going to manufacture a story I recommend at least referring to your sources as “security sources” or “intelligence sources” this gives you a vague whiff of some sort of something maybe resembling credibility.
The story was picked up from there and subsequently written about on the 20th in the slightly more reputable Washington Times emphasis on slightly The Washington Times to my knowledge doesn’t to date have bare breasted women occupying the third page of their newspaper. The Washington times article, cites a “senior intelligence official” (that’s more like it!) who claims that, US intelligence “intercepted an urgent communication between the leadership of al Qaeda in the Land of the Maghreb (AQIM) and al Qaeda’s leadership in the tribal region of Pakistan on the border with Afghanistan. The communication suggested that an area sealed to prevent leakage of a biological or chemical substance had been breached, according to the official.” The story has since then spread a fair bit to a range of different blogs who have picked up the story with gusto apparently enjoying the irony of AQIM terrorists dying of a medieval pestilence carried by fleas and the opportunity to dust off their Monty Python quote book. Most depressingly the story has received further “analysis” in the Counterterrorism blog which seems to have fallen hook, line, and sinker for this rather dubious bit of “news.”
Quite a few good points are raised by armchair generalist here– but for what it’s worth here are my two cents: the macro problem is the obsession in the blogosphere security community with chem and bio weapons and the desire to rush to the keyboard to type up breathless reports whenever an “incident” raises its head without pausing to give thought to analyze 1) whether the information is actually good 2) to carefully think about the actual security implications 3) to overhype the danger in a breathless doomsday scenario, that is replete with “what ifs.”
A first point is that while Al Qaeda’s interest in chemical and biological weapons is certainly well documented and something to keep an eye on security experts have serious doubts about the viability of terrorists weaponizing chemical weapons in a way that would be particularly deadly. In the “World At Risk” report made to congress headed by Bob Graham (executive summary here) the commission discounts chemical weapons as being able to cause significant casualties and certainly nowhere near the magnitude of a biological or nuclear attack. So while I am sure that efforts should be made to keep these weapons out of the hands of Al Qaeda and its supporters chem weapons are way down the ladder in terms of major security threats especially when you consider the tremendous devastation that a biological or nuclear weapon could cause.
Now this is certainly not my field of expertise but my understanding is that even weaponizing biological weapons is difficult. First of all weaponizing a virus like anthrax requires a certain amount of technical training, as well as some relatively sophisticated technology and a decent lab to make spores smaller so that they can disperse widely. Even if you were to steal a weaponized anthrax culture, a legitimate security concern, creating an aerosol system for spreading the biological agent can be tough. As the anthrax letters, immediately after Sept. 11th demonstrated biological agents can cause a tremendous amount of havoc and certainly should be a major focus of counterterrorism efforts but the problem with dubious stories like the AQIM Bubonic plague story is that apart from giving undue credence to what is at best a dubious story they usually provide little to no analysis about how biological weapons are (or might) actually be employed. While I certainly think keeping WMD out of the hands of Al Qaeda is a huge challenge facing security experts all over the globe a little caution and pragmatism is probably not a bad idea before writing breathless accounts about the potential devastation of Al Qaeda (or its surrogates) launching flea infested agents into the heart of of Europe.
2 Comments
January 24, 2009 at 7:24 am
Thankfully, a decent column calling for a little pragmatism before sensationalism. This discussion just came up in one of my graduate courses, and I had to research it. Immediately after reading the Washington Times article, I figured it was bogus. I do think that plague would make a good, cheap version of bioterrorism, but it isn’t a likely one due to the vector-borne disease requirements (would you just ship fleas over, carry them on a suicide flea-planter, or send some rats?).
January 27, 2009 at 7:49 pm
The sensationalism is a bit much. I think the Black Plague might be not so scary to the Western world the 2nd time around, now that we no longer chill with rats. The Counterterrorism blog fell off my reading list long ago, incidentally.