Remember this the next time you plug in your Sega Genesis for some throwback gameplay: al-Qaida once wanted to set off bombs concealed in your game cartridges.
That’s just one of the baroque examples of the terror group’s experimental techniques in mayhem. More than 90 documents relating to detainees at Guantanamo Bay disclosed by the anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks detail several others. Allegedly, al-Qaida had a nuclear bomb as early 2004. It wanted to use magnets to set mines on U.S. Navy ships. And it thought altimeter watches would make good detonators.
Now: No one knows how much of the information contained in WikiLeaks’ “Gitmo Files” is true. Indeed, it’s best to take the files with a shaker full of salt.
Information on the detainees comes from a variety of dubious sources: fragmentary info from when they were captured, which is often a hash of battlefield confusion; Gitmo snitches looking to win their freedom; and torture, especially in the case of detainees housed for years in hidden CIA prisons known as black sites.
(Our sister blog, Threat Level, discusses why this might be the last document dump from accused Army leaker Bradley Manning.)
Nothing in the documents gives any indication of what techniques interrogators used to extract specific pieces of information from a detainee. Better to read these documents for indications of what U.S. officials believed Gitmo detainees to know, rather than proof of what the detainees in fact knew.
But the documents suggest al-Qaida looked to the gaming world for terrorist inspiration. One of the highest ranking al-Qaida detainees held at Guantanamo — after a year in the CIA’s hidden “black site” prisons — is Abu Faraj al-Libi. He is believed to have replaced Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the 9/11 mastermind, in managing al-Qaida’s foreign terror operations. One of his most potent weapons was Sega.
A September 2002 raid on an al-Qaida safehouse in Karachi, Pakistan, turned up “over 20 radio-type detonating devices,” records al-Libi’s 2008 detainee assessment, written by Guantanamo officials. “Thedevices were built inside of black ‘Sega’ videogame cartridges and were designed for remote activation through use of a cellphone.”
The source for that information is Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, al-Libi’s former deputy and fellow black-site resident, who was recently convicted in a Manhattan court of involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
A harder case to credit from al-Libi’s Gitmo File holds that al-Qaida possessed a nuclear weapon in 2004 — as an insurance policy against the death or capture of Osama bin Laden. He told an associate that the bomb was located “in Europe” and al-Qaida was trying to use “Europeans of Arab or Asian descent” to move it. The idea was to detonate the bomb “in the U.S.” if bin Laden went down. But al-Libi lamented that “al-Qaida currently had no operatives in the U.S.,” as of June or July 2004.
A different plot held that al-Libi wanted to use “altimeter watches” to set off explosives smuggled onto an Indian airliner. Accordingly, the Daily Telegraph reports that a “certain model of Casio watch from the 1980s were seized by American forces in Afghanistan.”
The documents also contain clues about al-Qaida’s early experimentation with homemade bombs, the signature weapons of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. They’re not what you might expect. Egyptian detainee Tariq Mahmud Ahmed, captured during al-Qaida’s 2001 escape from Tora Bora, developed “specialized improvised explosive devices” for the terror group. Those included “limpet mines” — a mine that clamps onto a ship’s hull using magnets — “to sink U.S. naval vessels and the prototype for the shoe-bomb used in a failed attack on a civilian transatlantic flight.”
Ahmed was recommended for release from Gitmo in 2007 for good behavior.
These aren’t nearly the gamut of alleged al-Qaida tactics, techniques and procedures. WikiLeaks hasn’t even released 100 out of the 779 documents from Guantanamo it claims to possess. Gitmo Files for many of the highest ranking detainees, including many inmates of the CIA’s black sites, haven’t come to light yet.
Again, some of this stuff is hard to believe. (A nuclear bomb in al-Qaida’s possession? That it hasn’t used? Really?) And none of these techniques are known to have manifested in actual attempted attacks, unless you count the shoe bombing.
But just because a terror technique cited in the documents hasn’t been used by al-Qaida doesn’t mean it’s bunk. It’s an adaptive organization, and it can be expected to jettison certain practices if their architects are captured, the better to guard against countermeasures.
It might not have limpet mines, for instance, but the 2000 attack on the U.S.S. Cole demonstrates al-Qaida’s interest in detonating Navy ships. Think about that the next time you play Sonic.
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