My Next Thesis?

Here's an eye-popping article which I found in cyberspace and wish to share here as it is what any prophet of doom will predict is the unfolding tragedy that will befall humankind.

It's about those suicidal bogey folks in the world's most dangerous outfit known as Al-Qaeda and their nuclear ambitions.

I've got to tell you this juicy secret: I have a pretty good thesis in mind about the terrorist nuclear threat. Well, what would you find in it? For a glimpse of it, I would like to quote a lot from that famous bard William Shakespeare with such memorable classic lines as "And all the world's a stage. They have their exits and their entrances: And one man in his time play many parts". Aye, this would be an academic intellectual discourse into modern day political reality laden with underlying implications which would reach the bold conclusion that it is a matter of not the possession method but the timing when the gloomiest prophecy of all time will be fulfilled.

The good news is, you won't read about this thesis, a gloomy script of doom that is fit for a Hollywood movie block-buster simply because this is a nation that has yet to open its mind to those who think out of the box. I might as well have a swell time at Malaysia's only gambling casino around in the Genting Highlands' resort.

Well, how about a book? It's too bloody expensive to publish it ourselves and who dares to publish an unknown writer's piece of fictitious work?

I did hear about certain publications offering payment for articles overseas but to be honest about it, there are too many scams out there! Besides, there's a lot of hue and cry and a siege mentality in many democracies in the West today because of Al-Qaeda. Touching on this sensitive topic in a non-academic environment would certainly ruffle many feathers, and the next thing we know is that we're on the special Guantanamo Camp list, if not that notorious terrorist's death list!

By the way, if you're a movie-buff like me and wish to see the words of the bard in technicolour action on your cinema screens, enjoy the old movie classic, Imperium: Augustus, starring Peter O'Toole as Augustus and Charlotte Rampling as his cunning wife. I saw it recently. In true Hollywood finesse, towards the end, Augustus lies on his deathbed; just before the ancient customary death mask is placed over his face, he calls for an applause from those who are gathered around him, poising the classic line, "Did I play my part well?". What A brilliant line in a movie for a great emperor and the late actor himself! Don't we play our roles in everyday life?

Here is the article that is most interesting:

Portents of A Nuclear Al-Qaeda

By David Ignatius
Thursday, October 18, 2007; A25

Rolf Mowatt-Larssen is paid to think about the unthinkable. As the Energy Department's director of intelligence, he's responsible for gathering information about the threat that a terrorist group will attack America with a nuclear weapon.

With his shock of white hair and piercing eyes, Mowatt-Larssen looks like a man who has seen a ghost. And when you listen to a version of the briefing he has been giving recently to President Bush and other top officials, you begin to understand why. He is convinced that al-Qaeda is trying to acquire a nuclear bomb that will leave the ultimate terrorist signature -- a mushroom cloud.

We've all had enough fear-mongering to last a lifetime. Indeed, we have become so frightened of terrorism since Sept. 11, 2001, that we have begun doing the terrorists' job for them by undermining the legal framework of our democracy. And truly, I wish I could dismiss Mowatt-Larssen's analysis as the work of an overwrought former CIA officer with too many years in the trenches.

But it's worth listening to his warnings -- not because they induce more numbing paralysis but because they might stir sensible people to take actions that could detect and stop an attack. That's why his boss, Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, is encouraging him to speak out. Mowatt-Larssen doesn't want to anguish later that he didn't sound the alarm in time.

Mowatt-Larssen has been gathering this evidence since a few weeks after Sept. 11, when then-CIA Director George Tenet asked him to create a new branch on weapons of mass destruction in the agency's counterterrorism center. He helped Tenet prepare the chapter on al-Qaeda's nuclear efforts that appears in Tenet's memoir, " At the Center of the Storm." Now that the uproar over Tenet's mistaken "slam dunk" assessment of the Iraqi threat has died down, it's worth rereading this account. It provides a chilling, public record of al-Qaeda's nuclear ambitions.

Mowatt-Larssen argues that for nearly a decade before Sept. 11, al-Qaeda was seeking to acquire weapons of mass destruction. As early as 1993, Osama bin Laden offered $1.5 million to buy uranium for a nuclear device, according to testimony presented in federal court in February 2001. When the al-Qaeda leader was asked in 1998 if he had nuclear or chemical weapons, he responded: "Acquiring weapons for the defense of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons, then I thank God for enabling me to do so."

Even as al-Qaeda was preparing to fly its airplane bombs into buildings, the group was also trying to acquire nuclear and biological capabilities. In August 2001, bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, met around a campfire with Pakistani scientists from a group called Umma Tameer-E-Nau to discuss how al-Qaeda could build a nuclear device. Al-Qaeda also had an aggressive anthrax program that was discovered in December 2001 after bin Laden was driven from his haven in Afghanistan.

Al-Qaeda proclaimed a religious rationale to justify the WMD attacks it was planning. In June 2002, a Kuwaiti-born cleric named Suleiman Abu Ghaith posted a statement on the Internet saying that "al-Qaeda has the right to kill 4 million Americans" in retaliation for U.S. attacks against Muslims. And in May 2003, at the same time Saudi operatives of al-Qaeda were trying to buy three Russian nuclear bombs, a cleric named Nasir al-Fahd issued a fatwa titled "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels." Interrogations of al-Qaeda operatives confirmed that the planning was serious. Al-Qaeda didn't yet have the materials for a WMD attack, but it wanted them.

Most chilling of all was Zawahiri's decision in March 2003 to cancel a cyanide attack in the New York subway system. He told the plotters to stand down because "we have something better in mind." What did that mean? More than four years later, we still don't know.

After 2004, the WMD trail went cold, according to Mowatt-Larssen. Many intelligence analysts have concluded that al-Qaeda doesn't have nuclear capability today. Mowatt-Larssen argues that a more honest answer is: We don't know.

So what to do about this spectral danger? The first requirement, says Mowatt-Larssen, is to try to visualize it. What would it take for al-Qaeda to build a bomb? How would it assemble the pieces? How would the United States and its allies deploy their intelligence assets so that they could detect a plot before it was carried out? How would we reinvent intelligence itself to avert this ultimate catastrophe?

A terrorist nuclear attack, as Tenet wrote in his book, would change history. If we can see how this story might end, perhaps we can deflect the arrow before it hits its target.

The writer is co-host ofPostGlobal, an online discussion of international issues. His e-mail address isdavidignatius@washpost.com.