Study: Terror cult's persistence key to WMD attack (AP)

WASHINGTON – Experts argue over how hard it is for terrorists to make weapons of mass destruction, but a new study of the doomsday cult that carried out the Tokyo subway nerve gas attack says that even seemingly marginal groups can succeed with persistence and luck.

A report on the Aum Shinrikyo cult by ex-Navy Secretary Richard Danzig and colleagues at the Center for a New Security describes the cult's often bumbling efforts to make biological and chemical weapons in the 1980s and 1990s.

But the report says that the cult's persistence was key to its success in making sarin nerve agent, which it used in its deadly 1995 attack on Tokyo commuters that killed 13 and injured more than 6,000.

"Terrorists need time; time will be used for trial and error ...; trial and error entail risk and, in this case, provoked disruption; but Aum found paths to WMD, and other terrorists are likely to do the same," said the report.

Japanese authorities granted Danzig and his co-authors rare access to senior cult members being held in a Tokyo prison during a series of interviews that began in 2008.

Danzig told terrorism experts and others gathered to discuss the report Thursday that experts needed to understand the cult's quest for WMD in order to learn how to prevent others from doing the same thing.

Terror groups can seem "almost laughable" when they fail, Danzig said, and Aum Shinrikyo had many failures and setbacks. He cited one case where a cult devotee fell into a fermenting tank full of the bacterium that produces the botulinum toxin and nearly drowned. He was unharmed.

There was of course nothing funny about the group's successes, which included the subway attack and an earlier effort to use sarin gas to kill the judges in a commercial dispute involving the cult. The judges survived but eight people died in a nearby apartment building when the wind shifted.

Danzig compared the situation to Russian roulette. Terror groups trying to make WMD can keep shooting blanks, he said, "and then one of the chambers turns out to be loaded."

Danzig said the miniaturization of chemical equipment and the new synthetic biology, capable of producing disease-causing organisms, have only raised the risk that small groups can manufacture weapons capable of killing thousands.

But the report also said that the cult was never able to devise a way of disseminating its chemical and biological arsenal with any precision. Producing large quantities of these materials probably also remains a challenge.

The authors reported that the group struggled to make bioweapons, and it still isn't clear if it succeeded in producing deadly forms of anthrax or other pathogens. As a result, they concluded that it is probably much harder for terrorists to make biological arms than chemical weapons.

"As a rule of thumb, we think that conventional bomb makers who manufacture their weapons need days, chemists need weeks, biologists need months and nuclear terrorists need years," the study said.

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APNewsBreak: UK torture panel to study rendition (AP)

LONDON – A British inquiry will investigate CIA prisoner transfer practices as part of a probe into claims that terrorism suspects were tortured after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, officials confirmed Wednesday.

The three-member panel, commissioned by Prime Minister David Cameron to carry out a sweeping review of the country's role in the "war on terror," will scrutinize alleged British complicity in the secret U.S. rendition program.

Officials confirmed that the inquiry could see the heads of Britain's main spy agencies questioned in public for the first time.

The panel won't seek evidence from the U.S. or foreign allies, disappointing campaigners who hoped the study would be the most thorough yet of alleged murky practices by Western military and intelligence officials.

"Without a comprehensive examination of rendition, the drip-drip of allegations will continue. Far better to deal with it all now, draw a line and move on," said Conservative Party lawmaker Andrew Tyrie, who leads a parliamentary group that has led calls for greater scrutiny of the use of so-called extraordinary rendition — which involved the beyond-the-law transfer of terrorism suspects from country to country by the CIA.

Details of the inquiry's remit were announced publicly on Wednesday. Before the release, two people familiar with the issue had disclosed to The Associated Press that the rendition program would be scrutinized.

Human rights advocates allege that the CIA used the program to outsource torture of detainees to countries where it is permitted.

In a 2007 probe conducted on behalf of the Council of Europe, Swiss politician Dick Marty accused 14 European governments of permitting the CIA to run detention centers or carry out rendition flights between 2002 and 2005.

Last year, Cameron ordered former appeals court judge Peter Gibson to lead a study into alleged British complicity in torture and mistreatment of terrorist suspects held overseas.

Foreign Secretary William Hague said the inquiry was necessary to "clear the stain from our reputation as a country."

Britain has previously acknowledged that Diego Garcia, a British atoll in the Indian Ocean that hosts a U.S. military base, was twice used by the U.S. as a refueling stop during the 2002 secret transfers of two terrorism suspects.

It has also said that two suspected Pakistani militants detained by British troops in Iraq in 2004 were handed over to the U.S., and later covertly transferred to Afghanistan.

"The inquiry will be looking at whether U.K. government personnel were aware of, or involved in, the rendition of detainees from one country to another, and whether U.K. airports and U.K. airspace were used for this purpose," the panel said in a statement issued following publication of its remit.

Eliza Manningham-Buller, a former head of domestic spy agency MI5 who retired in 2007, has said previously that she believes the U.S. deliberately misled its allies over its handling of detainees.

In a document outlining its plans, the inquiry said spy agency chiefs and other key witnesses would be questioned in public unless to do so would compromise national security.

British spy chiefs are rarely seen in public and unlike their U.S. counterparts give evidence to legislative scrutiny committees in private.

"The heads and former heads of the security and intelligence agencies will be invited to give evidence on these issues, as far as possible, in public," the inquiry said.

Junior spies will be questioned in private, but ministers and other public officials will be expected to testify in public — unless dealing with sensitive matters of national security.

"The potential for embarrassment to these witnesses will not justify secrecy," the inquiry said.

Cameron has said the inquiry will not begin until police complete an investigation opened in 2009 into allegations that an intelligence officer with the country's MI6 spy agency was complicit in the mistreatment of detainees overseas.

Some rights groups have complained that the final decision on whether or not evidence studied by the inquiry can be made public will be taken by senior government officials — not the panel itself.

Clive Stafford Smith, director of rights group Reprieve, said the decision would effectively "give America a veto on much of what should be public."

The inquiry confirmed that — despite calls from some campaigners — it would not examine instances where detainees captured by British military forces were moved to other locations inside the same country. Britain's defense ministry is already studying those cases, it said.

Last year, Britain paid out settlements to a number of former Guantanamo Bay detainees who alleged U.K. complicity in their harsh treatment overseas, though the government did not admit any liability.

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Britain's detainee inquiry: http://www.detaineeinquiry.org.uk/

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David Stringer can be reached at twitter.com/david_stringer

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Fukushima meltdown could be template for nuclear terrorism, study says (The Christian Science Monitor)

The Fukushima disaster's dramatic demonstration of how nuclear plants are vulnerable to cooling-system failure could "awaken terrorist interest" in attacking such plants, says a new joint study by US and Russian experts on the threat of nuclear terrorism.

After 9/11, Al Qaeda operatives were reported to have to have conducted light reconnaissance of US nuclear reactor facilities. But beefed up defenses apparently led the terror group's leadership to conclude "it would be too difficult either to crash a plane into a nuclear facility or to sabotage a plant," says the report released Monday by the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

Now, however, Fukushima's multiple meltdowns could alter that line of thinking, says the "US-Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Nuclear Terrorism," whose authors include former CIA officials, Russian nuclear specialists, and nuclear proliferation experts.

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"One important lesson of the Chernobyl and Fukushima accidents is that what can happen as a result of an accident can also happen as a result of a premeditated action," the report says. "Indeed, today’s high levels of nuclear safety are dependent on the high reliability of components such as cooling systems; if these are intentionally destroyed, the probability of a large release would increase greatly."

While most of the report focuses on continued trafficking in nuclear material and the need to lock down vulnerable nuclear sites, it also confirms what nuclear-power watchdog groups in the US have been saying for months – that Fukushima demonstrated an acute vulnerability that could be exploited at US reactor sites.

"Terrorists will most likely try to damage a reactor’s support and water-supply systems as well as its control and protection system to cause a heat explosion of the reactor with subsequent demolition of the reactor and the building in which it is located," the Harvard study notes.

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Pools of circulating water that cool spent fuel could be an attractive a target, the report adds. At the Fukushima Daiichi plant, the spent-fuel pool belonging to its No. 4 reactor lost power to its cooling system, resulting in the water boiling off and a spent-fuel fire that released radiation directly into the atmosphere.

At least 28 reactors in the US have designs similar to the Fukushima plant, where spent-fuel pools are suspended near the ceiling of the reactor building. Such pools, when loaded with spent fuel, are safe as long as their cooling systems are working.

But US spent-fuel pools tend to be far more heavily loaded than those in Japan. Today, some 65,000 metric tons of spent fuel is stored at reactor sites around the country, 75 percent of it in US spent-fuel pools, according to data from the Nuclear Energy Institute cited in the report.

Some 30 million such rods are stored in spent-fuel pools at 51 sites around the country that "contain some of the largest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet," the study said.

IN PICTURES: Nuclear power around the world

The rods are usually kept in tightly packed racks submerged in pool water, which requires a steady flow of electricity to keep water circulating and the rods from overheating. If water drains from a spent-fuel pool, it can lead to a catastrophic fire that emits dangerous radioactive elements like Cesium 137.

Even so, the US does not mandate backup power for cooling systems to the pools, nuclear power watchdogs have noted in several recent studies.

The National Academy of Sciences in 2004 cited the pools as vulnerable to terrorist attack and fires. While the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has said the pools are safe, the Fukushima reactors' core meltdowns and spent-fuel pool fire prompted a new study of the possible impact of an earthquake or electrical blackout on US sites.

Now comes the Harvard study bolstering the terrorist threat to spent fuel.

"Even if terrorists fail to cause a wide-scale dispersal of radioactive material," the report says, "their sabotage efforts may still provoke widespread terror, shut down a reactor, and cause significant economic and socio-political damage.”

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