Al Qaeda terrorists contemplated an attack on New York subways in 2003 using an “easily constructed” device called a “mubtakkar” to release cyanide gas, according to a story in Time Magazine this week.
But there are reasons to question the reliability and significance of the story, suggested chemist George Smith of GlobalSecurity.org.
For one thing, “why, if the mubtakkar of death is so easy to make has it not been seen since, or employed in Iraq, or used anywhere there have been other terror attacks?”
See Smith’s skeptical account on his new blog Dick Destiny here and here.
An overview of chemical warfare agents and analytical methods for their identification was prepared this year by Defence Research and Development Canada.
See “Analysis of Chemical Warfare Agents: General Overview, LC-MS Review, In-House LC-ESI-MS Methods and Open Literature Bibliography” (pdf), Defence Research and Development Canada, March 2006.
This rule gives agencies significantly more authority over certain career policy roles. Whether that authority improves accountability or creates new risks depends almost entirely on how agencies interrupt and apply it.
Our environmental system was built for 1970s-era pollution control, but today it needs stable, integrated, multi-level governance that can make tradeoffs, share and use evidence, and deliver infrastructure while demonstrating that improved trust and participation are essential to future progress.
Durable and legitimate climate action requires a government capable of clearly weighting, explaining, and managing cost tradeoffs to the widest away of audiences, which in turn requires strong technocratic competency.
FAS is launching the Center for Regulatory Ingenuity (CRI) to build a new, transpartisan vision of government that works – that has the capacity to achieve ambitious goals while adeptly responding to people’s basic needs.