PAUL L. WILLIAMS,
Author of The Day of Islam
The Global Islamic Media Front, the leading al Qaeda website, has posted a report that verifies Osama bin Laden's possession of nuclear weapons and his intent, if provoked, to deploy these weapons against the United States.
The report maintains that bin Laden, when asked what will happen if the US uses nukes against his terrorist organization, said: "If they hit us with them, we will hit them with the same."
In November 2001, bin Laden provided a similar response to the same question during an interview with Hamid Mir. ""We have chemical and nuclear weapons," he told the Pakistani journalist. "If America uses chemical or nuclear weapons against us, then we may resort with chemical or nuclear weapons." When Mir asked bin Laden where he obtained such weapons, the al Qaeda leader said: "It is not difficult [to acquire such weapons], not if you have contacts in Russia and with other militant groups."
The Global Islamic Media Front report goes on to say that al Qaeda, prior to 9/11, had commissioned an Egyptian scientist to prepare its arsenal of nuclear weapons - - obtained from arms dealers, such as Semion Mogilevich of the Ukraine and black-market sources in Russia, Chechnya, China, Kazakhstan, Iran, and Sudan. This scientist, according to the Front, "tested exploding a miniature nuclear bomb and caused a huge, tremendous explosion which made the leaders of the mujahadeen very happy. Sheikh Osama personally was following the project through its various phases."
This account, too, was verified by Mir, who during the course of a conversation with intelligence analyst Ryan Mauro, said that the Egyptian scientist, in question, had lost an eye during a test of a radiological bomb in the Kunar province of Afghanistan. Mir related the same information to Polish journalist David Dastych.
During the course of his conversation with Mauro, Mir said that he had personally verified al Qaeda's smuggling of "three suitcase nukes from
Russia to Europe" and "many kilos of enriched uranium" to the United States for the construction of "more than six dirty bombs."
"I lost track of the three suitcase nukes after they were smuggled into Italy," Mir said. "I tried my best to get more information about those bombs but I am only one man. I only received one tip that Chechen members of Al-Qaeda wanted to smuggle one bomb into London, one into Paris, and one into California, but some dispute developed with the Italian underworld over the method of payment. This was in the year 2000.
"Al-Qaeda leaders claimed to have deployed their tactical weapons inside America. But when I tried to track the transportation of those weapons from Georgia, I lost track in Italy. I don't know the location of these today because my source left Afghanistan for Iraq last year. On the other hand, they claimed to me that weapons were smuggled to America through Mexico."