Bin Ladens Revenge: American Hiroshima

WikiLeaks docs: Nuclear reprisals if bin Laden killed

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And Washington is currently trying to fight the case by pleading sovereign immunity. But shortly after filing his suit, the factory's owner, Salah Idris, had his American bank accounts quietly unfrozen.

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Idris probably did have dealings with Bin Laden. As one of Sudan's richest businessmen, it would have been difficult not to.

Bin Laden was based in Khartoum for five years, building bridges, roads and farms and, of course, his al-Qaida terrorist group. But he was ushered out of Sudan a good two years before al-Shifa was flattened with such brilliant precision. Dr Idris Eltayeb, one of Sudan's handful of pharmacologists and chairman of al-Shifa's board, is still impressed by the mathematics of it.

But if Eltayeb is alive to the absurdity of American hi-tech pitted against "a simple factory in one of the poorest countries in the third world", he can also count the cost. Costlier imported versions are not an option for most of them - or for their husbands, wives and children, who will have been infected since.

Al-Shifa was also the only factory making veterinary drugs in this vast, mostly pastoralist, country.

Its speciality was drugs to kill the parasites which pass from herds to herders, one of Sudan's principal causes of infant mortality. Since the bombing, "people have gone back to doing without," says Eltayeb, with a shrug. Nobody was killed outright. Still worse than the cost to Sudan's fragile medical services was the political cost to a country struggling to emerge from totalitarian military dictatorship, ruinous Islamism and long-running civil war.

Ten years after President Omar al-Bashir seized power, a defiant policy of offering refuge to Muslim brothers had turned Sudan into a pariah state. Ethiopia, Eritrea, Kenya and Uganda were backing Christian rebels in the south. The economy was in ruins. And so Khartoum was being forced to open up. The terrorists - famously, Bin Laden and Carlos the Jackal - had been kicked out. The government was talking to its neighbours. Then al-Shifa was bombed, and overnight Khartoum was plunged into the nightmare of impotent extremism it had been trying to escape.

Sudan is still struggling to purge itself of the diehards. Almost overnight, under intense U. Today, the United States lives in fear of the bomb it created, because the decision to use it has already been made. Pious men with beards will decide when and where on U. Shadowy groups, propelled by fanatical hatreds, scour the globe for materials.

They are not in a hurry. Time is on their side. They are doubtless confident they will one day breach Fortress America. The possibilities for nuclear attack are not limited to the so-called suitcase bomb stolen from the arsenal of a nuclear state. In fact, getting and exploding such a bomb is far more difficult than the use of improvised nuclear devices fabricated from highly enriched uranium, constructed in the very place where they will eventually be detonated.

Still more likely is an attack on a vulnerable nuclear reactor or spent fuel repository.

Some nuclear weapons experts say privately that it is not a question of if but when the attack will happen. This may be too pessimistic, but tighter policing and monitoring of nuclear materials and rapid reduction of stockpiles and nuclear weapons knowledge must be the first step. There should not be the slightest delay in moving on this. But this is far from sufficient. If nuclear weapons continue to be accepted by nuclear weapon states as legitimate instruments of deterrence or war, their global proliferation — whether by other states or non-state actors — can only be slowed at best.

Strike one

Coercive nonproliferation will only serve to drive up demand. Nonproliferation by cooperation and consent cannot succeed as long as the United States insists on retaining and improving its nuclear arsenal. By what reasonable argument can others be persuaded to give up, or not acquire, nuclear weapons?

So what will happen when religious fanatics succeed in a nuclear attack? The world shall plunge headlong into a bottomless abyss of reaction and counter-reaction in a horror the human mind cannot comprehend. Who will the United States retaliate against? Will the United States nuke Mecca? The capitals of Muslim states? In January , Hamza then 12 years old , his father and other family members attended the wedding of his brother Mohammed bin Laden in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar.

In March , it was claimed that Hamza and his brother Saad bin Laden had been wounded and captured in Ribat, Afghanistan. This claim eventually proved false. Hamza married a daughter of Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah when he was 17 years old. In a video titled The Mujahideen of Waziristan , Hamza is shown participating in an al-Qaeda assault on Pakistani security forces in the south Waziristan tribal region between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

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In July , The Sun published a translation of a poem said to be written by Hamza, which had been published on an extremist Islamic Web site. On 14 August , he released an audio message for the very first time.

On 11 May it was reported he had released an audio message focused on the issues of Palestine and the Syrian Civil War. He said the "blessed Syrian revolution" had made the prospect of "liberating" Jerusalem more likely.

In July , media reported that he had issued an audio message threatening the United States in revenge for his father's death. This effectively put him on a blacklist aimed at restricting his movement and economic abilities. In May , a video was released in which he calls on his followers to attack Jews, Americans, Westerners and Russians, via lone wolf attacks using any means possible.

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