Making yourself look like idiots.

I ran across this article a yesterday and although it is clearly Daily Mailesque in its tone it did rather make me smile at the sheer idiocy of the claim.

Emirates 24.

The mastermind of the 9/11 attacks warned that Al-Qaeda has hidden a nuclear bomb in Europe that will unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" if Osama bin Laden is captured, leaked files revealed on Monday.
Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told Guantanamo Bay interrogators the terror group would detonate the device if the Al-Qaeda chief was captured or killed, acording to the classified files released by the WikiLeaks website.
Sheikh Mohammed, the self-professed mastermind of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States, has been held at Guantanamo since 2006 and is to be tried in a military court at the US naval base on Cuba over the attacks.
His nuclear threat was revealed in Britain's Daily Telegraph newspaper, one of several media outlets which have published the classified assessments of detainees at Guantanamo.
Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003 in Pakistan, also claims to have personally beheaded US journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002 with his "blessed right hand" and to have helped in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that killed six people.

 

First off setting off a nuclear bomb is not at all straight forward, as an engineer I can assure you that those things need constant expert maintenance, the timing circuit alone for the various plates to come together in just the right sequence is set to the millisecond otherwise the thing just fizzles and this thing has apparently been just sitting there since 2003?
Now given that most Islamic fanatics are like kids with a new toy when it comes to letting off weapons and committing atrocities in the name of their deity can anyone imagine them not setting it off as and when they got it into the West? So it boils down to 2 choices, they haven't got one (quite likely) or they can't set it off (possible, though there are some smart Muslim engineers out there). There's also the problem of the reaction of Europe should they do something as barbaric and I doubt it would be pleasant nor I suspect would the cries of it's only a "tiny minority" rhetoric that would be wheeled out, along with reassurances that Islam is actually all about peace and is no way connected with this heinous act. Move along now, nothing to see here, be much of a shield for them. A government that failed to act to remove Islam from its borders would be an ex government in days. If those who think that Islamophobia is a problem now, just wait till they do something truly stupid. Even a simple option for them such as a dirty bomb is likely to provoke an extreme reaction and I suspect those at the top of the terrorist tree know this. So all in all this is a massive bluff by Al Quaeda, I know it, and I suspect anyone reading it would know it, particularly in the West, it's not even particularly good propaganda as their own side will be wondering why they haven't set it off.
Oh sure I believe our security forces will take it seriously enough to at least look, but I doubt they'll find one, smart money says they haven't got one otherwise they'd have set it off already.