09/02/02
EDITORIAL NUMBER=0-10104

AL-QAIDA CHEMICAL WEAPONS

Videotapes acquired in Afghanistan by the U.S.-based Cable News Network - C-N-N -- paint a frightening picture of the threat that Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida terrorist network poses to civilized nations across the globe.

C-N-N recently broadcast excerpts from the sixty-four videocassettes, including previously unseen footage of terrorists training at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan. These camps were run by al-Qaida under the auspices of Afghanistan's former Taleban rulers, who were toppled from power by the Afghan resistance and U.S.-led coalition. The C-N-N footage showed that the camps provided instruction in a variety of sinister activities, including techniques of bomb-making, kidnapping, and assassination.

Most disturbing of all was the footage showing the apparent testing of a poisonous gas on dogs. According to C-N-N, this al-Qaida experiment with lethal chemicals was thought to have been performed at the Darunta camp, not far from the eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad.

The C-N-N footage is now added to other evidence that al-Qaida used its safe-haven in Taleban-ruled Afghanistan to work on developing chemical weapons. Ahmed Ressam, a terrorist trained in Afghanistan by al-Qaida in 1998, was convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. In July 2001, he testified in court that one of his al-Qaida trainers had performed a chemical-weapons test on a dog. The animal, he said, was killed with a poisonous gas made from mixing cyanide and sulfuric acid. In addition, instructions for making the deadly nerve gas sarin were discovered among al-Qaida documents captured in Afghanistan following the Taleban's overthrow.

As President George W. Bush said, the great threat to civilization "is that a few evil men will multiply their murders and gain the means to kill on a scale equal to their hatred." The videotape of al-Qaida chemical-weapons experiments makes one thing crystal clear: to prevent mass terror, the United States and its allies must stop terrorists and the states that sponsor them from ever being able to use, or threaten to use, weapons of mass destruction.