November 28, 2005
Dirty Bomb Redux
...if uranium is actually the "radiological agent" that Zubayda suggested Padilla use, then Zubayda doesn't know diddley-squat about nukes – "dirty" or otherwise.
Shortly after 9-11, the dirty bomb "experts" at the Federation of American Scientists told the world how to make one that would work.
The FAS "dirty bomb" was a "coffee jar" containing about a thousand curies of a true radiological material such as Cobalt-60.
[That's about the radiological source-strength of a medical radio-therapy unit used to irradiate cancer patients.]
A successful bomb would have to be designed with great sophistication, first to break open the "coffee jar," then to gradually heat the radioactive source so that it vaporized, and finally to scatter it to the winds.
~So Padilla's dirty bomb was never a WMD? More to the point are dirty bombs as weapons of terrorism too complex to be bloody likely?
Did Padilla have access to the uranium? Addresses of medical supply wholesalers?
Are dirty bombs the stuff of tv dramas and bad movies, something to frighten the rubes?
Did the Bushies use terrorist talk of improbable dirty bombs to scare us and to imprison an American citizen for three years without due process?
>related
Padilla indictment silent on 'dirty bomb'
On Padilla's arrest by FBI agents in 2002, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft described him as a "known terrorist who was exploring a plan to build and explode a radiological dispersion device, or 'dirty bomb,' in the United States."
But the federal court charges against Padilla, a U.S. citizen, make no mention of any such plot. The words "dirty bomb" do not appear in the indictment, unsealed Tuesday, nor does any specific mention of al Qaeda. Instead, it speaks of his involvement in a North American terrorist "support cell."
...remarks by former U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who said the challenge of charging Padilla in federal court would be that prosecutors "obviously, can't use any of the statements he's made in military custody."
["Dirty Bomb" digital print by Nigel Ayers]