Agence France Presse August 19, 2002
Al-Qaeda videos show terror group could launch chemical assault: experts
BY PATRICK ANIDJAR
Secret al-Qaeda videotapes broadcast by CNN showing troops training and dogs being gassed suggest Osama bin Laden's network has the capability to launch a limited chemical attack, experts said Monday.
"This is consistent with everything we've learned about al-Qaeda, its methods, its aspirations," said White House national security spokesman Mike Anton.
"These are evil people with evil intentions, and this is further proof of the urgency of rooting out global terror." Members of the terror network blamed for the September 11 strikes on New York and Washington are seen in training exercises. Their feet hastily leaving a room where a dog is fatally exposed to poison gas are also among the images included on the tapes.
Experts consulted by CNN said the cache of videotapes demonstrates that the terror network of Saudi exile bin Laden may be even more sophisticated than previously thought, adept at handling chemical agents and possibly making chemical weapons.
The archive of 64 videotapes, which spans more than a decade, also shows previously unseen images of bin Laden and his top aides, including bin Laden's personal security arrangements and training procedures for terrorists.
In one scene shown repeatedly by the cable network, a man tosses a container into a see-through enclosure holding a light-colored dog, which then salivates heavily and drops, paws in the air.
"What we see here confirms what everybody has believed all along: that al-Qaeda has an interest in chemical weapons and has experimented with chemical weapons," said John Pike, a defense specialist at the globalsecurity.org think tank.
The tapes also underscore al-Qaeda's lack of sophistication, he said.
"What we see on these tapes is extremely unsophisticated. This is the sort of thing that they might use to attack a subway station or an airport lobby, but not something they can use to attack a city," he said.
"But it might be deadly in a limited and a crowded area."
The New York Times and CNN quoted a series of experts who reviewed the tapes.
One of them, Magnus Ranstorp of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at Saint Andrews University in Scotland, said western intelligence had underestimated al-Qaeda.
Others quoted in The New York Times said the dogs' reactions to the gas were similar to reactions to sarin gas, used in 1995 by a Japanese doomsday cult in a subway attack in Tokyo that killed 12 and injured thousands.
"That terrible racking sound of the dog in its death throes is a classic sound of a nerve agent like sarin," said David Kay, senior vice president of the Science Applications International Corporation, a company that works for the government and commercial clients.
Frederick Sidell, a chemical weapons expert who worked at the Army Medical Institute of Chemical Defense, told the daily he doubted sarin or cyanide was used.
While calling the video unsettling, he said it was not clear the dogs had died.
A US government source said officials had yet to view the tapes beyond what had been shown by CNN television. A CIA spokesperson did not immediately comment.
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