In Wikileaks Gitmo dump, nuclear revenge threats from Qaeda loyalists if bin Laden killed

CNET: "Recently-released WikiLeaks documents show that detained al Qaeda members have predicted nuclear reprisals if Osama bin Laden were captured or killed."

Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

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EvilSpirit

Yeah, we’ll know al Quaeda has a nuke because they will waste no time in setting it off. They haven’t, hence they don’t.
Ceronomus

Utter BS, if they could nuke us, they WOULD nuke us. There is no doubt there. They just have used that as a deterrent, just as Saddam used the idea that he had WMDs as a deterrent.

It didn’t work in either case.
chromecow

So, just double checking here:

Bin Laden at large: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk
Bin Laden dead: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk

Sweet, sweet victory.
libelle

I think the Jihadis have made the mistake of reading crap like WorldNetDaily — and believing what they read.

To echo everyone above, if they had managed to acquire a big bomb of any sort, we would have known by the explosion in New York (or maybe LA).
Don

Nuclear terrorism has always been our fantasy, not theirs. Their whole approach has been to use inexpensive, relatively low-tech weapons in a spectacular way. Nuclear material would be hard to obtain, hard to handle, hard to transport to the target. And that’s just for a “dirty bomb,” never mind a bomb capable of an actual nuclear chain reaction, which would require more expertise, and would be harder still to obtain. It just doesn’t seem economical, from their point of view.
Anonymous

Detonate dirty bomb?

The criminal organization known as TEPCO beat Al Qaeda to it.
Micah

“Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you keep it a secret!”
- Yamara
  
  Osama was to announce it in his next Ramadan message tape.
  
  You know how he loves surprises.
GlenBlank

Yeah, and Mullah Omar promised that “the rain of airplanes” wouldn’t stop after 9/11, too.
GlenBlank

So, just double checking here:

Bin Laden at large: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk
Bin Laden dead: Security Risk, Raise Alert Level, TSA touches my Junk

In case you hadn’t noticed, the color-coded ‘all panic all the time’ Homeland Security Advisory System has been replaced by the National Terrorism Advisory System, which “will include information specific to the particular credible threat, and will not use a color-coded scale.” (FAQ #1, Dept. of Homeland Security home page is headlined “Beware of Osama Bin Laden Email Phishing Schemes“, which warns Americans that “major news events like this one often bring a wave of phishing scams”.

The DHS home page also links to a Statement by Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano on the Death of Osama Bin Laden, which specifically says:

We remain at a heightened state of vigilance, but the Department of Homeland Security does not intend to issue an NTAS alert at this time. I have been clear since announcing NTAS in January that we will only issue alerts when we have specific or credible information to convey to the American public.

You might want to ‘double check’ the possibility that you could be operating on an outmoded paradigm.
Anonymous

I’m as shocked as the next person. It turns out this people lied to us and told us whatever we wanted to hear while we tortured them. It’s a bloody outrage!
Anonymous

This article at firedoglake suggests that Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri recanted his claim that UBL had a bomb: http://fdl.me/iBDnzH
jwz

Al Quaeda members were also heard to say that they had been told that they could listen to the radio at a reasonable volume from nine to eleven when they’re collating, and also, that they could set the building on fire.
Rindan

While the TSA has proven to be good at nothing other than molesting innocent people and giving the pr0n industry a run for their money, we need not worry. The last bombing attempts have resulted in terrorist giving them selves a hot foot before having the piss beaten out of them by random civilians, and blowing up their junk… and then having the piss beat out of them by civilians. Now maybe this was a clever ploy to get me to let my guard down… or maybe we are pissing away trillions of dollars defending against a threat that ranks many orders of magnitude below the dangers I face when I go biking through Boston.

Personally, I say fuck the the TSA and homeland security. Telling people to beat the shit out of anyone trying to set off a bomb has been the most effective security measure we have implemented to date, and it is very cheap. Cheap is a good thing when you defend against a threat that ranks below choking on your own food and MANY orders of magnitude below eating yourself to death.

Somehow, I don’t think scary bombers who when attempting to blow up a plane manage to literally blow their dick up without hurting anyone else are really in much of a position to nuke us. I just hope that we get it out of our heads that these incompetent morons are a threat and that we go find something more interesting to waste our money on… like paying down the debt, or buying everyone in the US some waffles.

To all the ‘scary’ would be terrorist making empty threats I have only two words:

u mad?
- MrsBug
  
  Your post made me smile. And laugh.
Lobster

Really? The guys who would love nothing more than to nuke us say that if bin Laden died, they’d love to nuke us? YOU DON’T SAY.
dMc

I’m wondering how they retaliated after Zarqawi was killed.
fergus1948

Most comments here are assuming that the jihadists are talking about a bomb threat while also pointing out that Al Qaeda is unlikely to have any such nuclear weapons.

However, it is much more likely that they are thinking of a conventional bomb being used at a US or UK nuclear power station. (Fukushima has amply demonstrated the mayhem that can be caused by that degree of damage, albeit by an act of nature in that instance.)

Security people in the UK detained a group of men filming facilities at the Sellafield nuclear processing plant yesterday and though it would be nice to think they were just film school grads out for the day the indications are to the contrary.

Pretending that serious acts of reprisal are not now on the agenda would be a little naive. Just sayin’
Antinous / Moderator

To be fair, it is the only way to be sure.
aldasin

They’ve shown admirable restraint in not unleashing this nuclear horror while we rolled through Iraq and continue to be a nuisance in Afghanistan.
- starfish and coffee
  
  my thoughts exactly. this sort of thing has been on their agenda all along. UBL death makes no difference.
onath

They were trained by the massive terrorist army that isn’t bombing unsecured targets due to TSA security measures.
Donald Petersen

Well, of course that’s what they’d say. I don’t think I’m going to change my weekend plans as a result.

It’s an inevitable show of saber-rattling on both parts. We say, “Boy howdy, lookit all this juicy intel we got off Bin Laden’s hard drives! Every last al-Qaeda secret is laid bare for us to see and exploit!” Swell if it’s true, arguably effective even if it isn’t. Surely a decent percentage of the al Qaeda-associated team can’t know for sure whether the jig’s up or not, so there will result at least a certain amount of panic on their part, to our undisguised glee.

And in the same vein is the threat of… how you say?… oh, yes: “nuclear hellstorm.” Whether or not al Qaeda actually possesses the capability, some American knees will quake. And so our Homeland Security apparatus will overreact as it is wont to do. And the waltz continues…
- emmdeeaych
  
  I have a hard time believing they have much more than sabers.
  
  Rattle on you crazy diamonds.
JayByrd

Hey, they can’t even get their underwear to go off.
jphilby

The most cogent thing I’ve heard on the media in two days:

“One Killer Killing Another”
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/5/2/one_killer_killing_another_journalist_and

“They see that he is dead, and they say, ‘Oh, great, we killed bin Laden.’ But they donâ€™t see the other 20, 30, 50, 100 people who the U.S. killed that day, many of them children, many of them civilians. If they did, they probably wouldnâ€™t be out in the street cheering about those deaths.”
- dttri
  
  “Weâ€™ve got to stop this practice [of killing dozens of people every day]. And Americans arenâ€™t doing it. Egyptians, Tunisians are doing their part. Theyâ€™ve risen up against the repression they face. I think we need an American uprising, if weâ€™re to put a stop to this kind of killing of innocent people.”
  
  Thanks for the pointer jphilby. Great read.
jjsaul

Gosh, it’s a lucky thing that the people who were hiding him don’t have access to nuclear weapons.
Anonymous

Wait! There’s been a change of plan. They are going to put all their resources into BP stock. That way they can devastate larges tracts of the nation while still turning a tidy profit.