I’m guessing Ashcroft won’t apologize
‘Dirty bomber’ has no links to al-Qaeda
The investigation into Jose Padilla, who is accused of planning to detonate a radioactive “dirty bomb” in the United States, has found no evidence that he was preparing such an attack and little to suggest that he had any support from al-Qaeda to do so, FBI officials say.
The findings could be an embarrassment for the US Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, who focused unprecedented attention on Padilla’s arrest in March, describing it as a textbook example of collaboration between the FBI and CIA.
But FBI officials said their investigations had concluded that Padilla was probably no more than a “small fish” with no ties to al-Qaeda cells in the US. Any plot to detonate a dirty bomb had probably never gone beyond the stage of being “thought out”, they said.