In a word yes they will. The question is do they have them? The answer is probably no because I dont see where they would continue to hold onto them if they do. Al-Qaeda needs to strike a quick decisive blow to show that they are still a viable terror organization and they havent been able to. They are desperate to make some sort of statement because they have a new leader who needs to consolidate his leadership and control. The US has also made tremendous gains in their troop surge in Afghanistan and al-Qaeda has not been able to answer.
Al-Qaeda has recently promised to conduct 100 terror attacks in Iran to retaliate for the operation which took out Osama bin Laden but I believe that this is just more talk than anything else. It sounds good but I personally dont believe that they have enough juice left to pull it off.
I dont believe that al-Qaeda has these weapons because if they have they missed an opportunity to put them to use after the bin Laden incident. They are probably seeking to get them and it is quite possible that they will. The US has started an initiative to account for all of the nuclear material in the world which could be used but I think that such an initiative is fruitless. It is necessary but there are issues which surface which prevent it from being a viable course of action.
Mike Leiter, the just-retired director of the National Counterterrorism Center, has made the following statement; "We still have pockets of al-Qaida around the world who see this as a key way to fight us, especially the offshoot in Yemen," he said. "The potential threat from al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula is very real." Leiter said the new breed of terrorists understands that killing a few Americans can cause as much fear as the massive plots bin Laden backed. Whatever they may have in inventory isnt much but it may be enough to scare a lot of people because of the uncertainty that it would cause. For example, if they were to use a little bit of an agent in an attack the world would be fearful of a second attack because the perception would be that there was more WMD available for future attacks.
With bin Laden gone, Leiter and former CIA Deputy Director John McLaughlin both predicted new leader Ayman al-Zawahiri (the new al-Qaeda leader) will want to launch similar smaller scale campaigns.
Zawahiri is a different type of leader than bin Laden was in that he's not as charismatic ... but more disciplined. Zawahiri has long been interested in using weapons of mass destruction to attack.
"What we will know is there has been no successful inbound attack since 9/11 that we can attribute directly to al-Qaida," added Charles Allen, who has held multiple top positions at the CIA over the years. "But we can see this metastasized network linked by Internet that is self-sustaining across the world."
Leiter said the trove of information, including inter-al-Qaida communications, taken from bin Laden's compound where he was killed by U.S. commandoes showed the group already was struggling.
He said the documents revealed bin Laden was not the CEO of a large multinational corporation, as analysts thought, but the "slightly out of touch coordinator of a broad dysfunctional family who, frankly, were operating on their own agendas more than his."
But he said al-Qaida and the other groups still have enough organization and staff to keep attacking. This makes it a viable threat to the United States because it is fractionalized and unpredictable. A future attack could come from anywhere at anytime.
Military Ring Express
