US: Claims that the al-Qaeda chief may be seeking to mount a WMD attack should not be dismissed as fantasy, write Rory Miller and Martin Navias.
The claims on Sunday night's CBS flagship news programme 60 Minutes that Osama bin Laden had now gained religious approval for the use of a Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) should be taken seriously.
Admittedly, that may be a lot to ask of those still bewildered by the recent intelligence blunders over Saddam's WMD capability, who will understandably wonder whether we are not once more being led astray by limited and faulty intelligence coupled with questionable analysis.
But the claim, made by Michael Scheuer, the former head of the CIA's special unit tracking Osama bin Laden, and the author of two books critical of the West's approach to the war on terror under the pseudonym Anonymous, should not be dismissed.
Since establishing al-Qaeda in the late 1980s, bin Laden and his senior associates have presented their actions and objectives down to the smallest detail in religious terms. A fatwa committee, comprising senior al-Qaeda associates, met regularly to rule on Islamic law and to provide religious justification for, among other things, terror operations.
In 1998 and again in 1999 and 2000/'1, bin Laden emphasised that gaining a WMD capability was a "religious duty". In 1998, for example, he explained: "acquiring weapons for the defence of Muslims is a religious duty. If I have indeed acquired these weapons then I thank God for enabling me to do so. And if I seek to acquire these weapons I am carrying out a duty".
Moreover, from a practical point of view the acquisition and employment of a nuclear weapon, especially if it could be defended on religious grounds, would add hugely to bin Laden's standing among Islamists. Indeed, al-Qaeda has always operated on the assumption that the bigger the terror attack, the more killed or injured, the better for its standing in the Muslim world.
As one al-Qaeda supporter caught on video discussing 9/11 with bin laden pointed out: "Hundreds of people used to doubt you and few only would follow you until this huge event happened. Now hundreds of people are coming to join you."
Even if one accepts that talk of a WMD capability and various dramatic warnings of a "Winds of Black Death" strike "against Jews, the Americans and crusaders in general" is part of al-Qaeda's highly effective propaganda arsenal, such claims also fit in with the organisation's core ideology.
In particular, it appeals as a means of fulfilling the Islamic principle of retaliation that legitimises the mass killing of infidels belonging to the Dar al-hab (the House of War) for what are perceived to be their immense crimes against Islam and the Muslim world (Dar al-Islam).
As an al-Qaeda message broadcast by al-Jazeera in November 2002 put it: "Why should fear, killing, destruction, displacement, orphaning and widowing continue to be our lot, while security, stability and happiness be your lot? This is unfair. It is time that we get even. You will be killed just as you kill, and will be bombed just as you bomb."
In this context, it is interesting to note that in 1996, 2001 and 2002, bin Laden raised the issue of America's use of atomic weapons against the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as evidence of American disregard for life and to highlight the hypocrisy of those condemning Islamist violence.
Similarly, in a now infamous series of lectures published in the wake of 9/11, Suleiman Abu Ghait, an al-Qaeda spokesman and close associate of bin Laden, justified the use of nuclear weapons on the grounds that the evils perpetrated by the US against Muslims - in Iraq, Palestine, Somalia and elsewhere - gave Muslims a right to kill a further four million Americans including one million children, to displace eight million others and to wound or injure further hundreds of thousands.
This argument has been echoed by a number of other Islamist clerics whose wide-ranging expositions on the violence permissible against infidel civilians under Islamic law have had the effect of legitimising the use of any, and all weapons against civilian populations.
Of course intentions do not equate to capabilities. For much of the last decade, bin Laden and his followers have been devotees of what has been termed the "rhetoric of mass destruction", yet most of the evidence pointing to Bin Laden going down the WMD route is circumstantial.
Even with religious permission to use a WMD, bin Laden would still need to be able to acquire and employ such a weapon. This is no easy task and makes it likely that any such capability would be in the form of a 'dirty' radiation bomb rather than a sophisticated nuclear device.
Dr Rory Miller is lecturer and Dr Martin Navias is Senior Research Fellow in Mediterranean Studies, King's College, London. Their study, 'Al Qaeda and Weapons of Mass Destruction: What we know, how we know it', will be published in the new year in World Defence Systems: The International Review of Defence Acquisition Issues.