President George W Bush thrust the war on terror back to centre stage this week, pledging a ”full-scale manhunt” against al-Qaida, as doubts began to snowball about United States government claims to have foiled a plot to detonate a ”dirty bomb” containing radioactive materials in an American city.
”We will run down every lead, every hint,” Bush told reporters, adding that Abdullah al-Muhajir (31), a US citizen born Jose Padilla, who was arrested at a Chicago airport while allegedly planning the radioactive attack, was ”where he needs to be — detained. This guy Padilla’s a bad guy.”
There were still people who wanted to harm the US, he added, and ”as we run down these killers or would-be killers, we’ll let you know”.
But US officials who originally briefed the media on the plot appeared to be backing away from the story on Wednesday.
And civil liberties advocates responded with suspicion to the government’s reclassification of Muhajir as an ”enemy combatant”, allowing him to be held indefinitely in military custody. Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, has admitted that they had no intention of bringing him to trial. ”Our interest is not in trying and punishing him,” he said. ”Our interest is in finding out what he knows.” Muhajir was ”unquestionably involved in terrorist activities”, he added.
Some interpreted the move as an attempt to avoid having to construct a court case.
Juliette Kayyem, a terrorism expert at Harvard University, said: ”That is not unchallengeable. In other words, there are probably going to be lawyers out there who argue, because he’s a US citizen, he should be in our normal criminal justice system.”
Attorney General John Ashcroft announced Muhajir’s detention while in Moscow on a European tour, declaring that the government had disrupted ”an unfolding terrorist plot to attack the US by exploding a radioactive dirty bomb”.
But the CBS News network was reporting on Tuesday that the same officials who conveyed the original news of the intercepted plot on Monday were now downplaying the seriousness of the threat.
FBI director Robert Mueller and Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Defence Secretary, both conceded that the plot had never progressed past the early planning stages — fuelling speculation that the announcement had been talked up because of its political usefulness to the Bush administration.
The resurgence of the war on terror could further discourage dissent from Democratic members of Congress, while boosting Bush’s attempts to establish the new department of homeland security. Congressional hearings about the new department opened on Tuesday.
But other US officials said Muhajir met senior al-Qaida leaders after September 11 to discuss possible attacks in the US, including detonating dirty bombs, which combine conventional explosives with radioactive waste, and blowing up hotels and petrol stations.
”He is the guy who had discussed with [top Osama bin Ladin lieutenant Abu] Zubaydah plans to conduct a variety of plans including [dirty bombs],” a US official was quoted as saying.
- Meanwhile, report Richard Norton-Taylor and Giles Tremlett, British and other Western intelligence agencies were this week engaged in an international operation to uncover the full network behind the first targeting of British military forces by al-Qaida terrorists.
As details emerged of the potential scale of the foiled mission, British sources emphasised that they had strong evidence that suicide bomb attacks on both British and US warships in the Strait of Gibraltar and on the Rock itself had been planned.
A three-man al-Qaida cell, made up of Saudi nationals living in Morocco, was preparing to launch attacks similar to that which killed 17 US sailors on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000, senior Moroccan officials said. Only one of those arrested, 32-year-old Abdallah El Gareh, was named this week.
The three men, aged between 25 and 35, were picked up on May 11 after being followed for several weeks.
The al-Qaida unit had allegedly been preparing to pack Zodiac-style rubber speedboats with explosives and send them crashing against warships in one of the world’s busiest sea traffic lanes.
The men had admitted belonging to Bin Laden’s al-Qaida group, a Moroccan security source said.
Five detainees, who are being held in Casablanca, are due in court next week. The Moroccan wives of two of the men, who allegedly worked as couriers, were arrested on Monday as part of Operation Gibraltar, which also involved British, US, French and Spanish intelligence services.