UPI: Report: Al Qaida has 'dirty bomb' Drudge (TIME): NYC nukes kept secret from proles AP: yet another cross-border smuggling tunnel, 1000 ft long, with rails and power
You do the math. Oh, and don't forget the Columbian submarines.. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=03032002-122721-3640r http://www.drudgereport.com/flash.htm http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/20020228/ap_on_re_us/drug_tunnel_1 .... XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX SUN MARCH 03, 2002 09:22:37 ET XXXXX OCTOBER BULLETIN SAID TERRORISTS THOUGHT TO HAVE 10 KILOTON NUCLEAR WEAPON TO BE SMUGGLED INTO NEW YORK CITY Sun Mar 03 2002 10:40:24 ET New York -- In October, an intelligence alert went out to a small number of government agencies, including the Energy Department's top-secret Nuclear Emergency Search Team, based in Nevada. The report said that terrorists were thought to have obtained a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon from the Russian arsenal, and planned to smuggle it into New York City, a special TIME magazine investigation reveals. The source: a mercurial agent code-named DRAGONFIRE, who intelligence officials believed was of "undetermined" reliability, TIME reports. But DRAGONFIRE'S claim tracked with a report from a Russian general who believed his forces were missing a 10-kiloton device. That made the DRAGONFIRE report alarming. So did this: detonated in lower Manhattan, a 10-kiloton bomb would kill some 100,000 civilians and irradiate 700,000 more, flattening everything in a half-mile diameter. Counterterrorist investigators went on their highest state of alert, TIME reports. "It was brutal," a U.S. official told TIME. It was also highly classified and closely guarded. Under the aegis of the White Houses Counterterrorism Security Group, part of the National Security Council, the suspected nuke was kept secret so as not to panic the people of New York. Senior FBI officials were not in the loop. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani says he was never told about the threat. In the end, the investigators found nothing, and concluded that DRAGONFIRE'S information was false. But few of them slept better. -------- Report: Al Qaida has 'dirty bomb' Published 3/3/2002 1:51 AM WASHINGTON, March 3 (UPI) -- The consensus view within the U.S. government is that the al Qaida terrorist group has acquired lower-level radioactive substances that ordinary explosives could spread as contaminants, The Washington Post reported Sunday. Although such a so-called dirty bomb could cause a more modest number of deaths than an actual nuclear weapon, it could have a considerable impact as a "weapon of psychological terror," an unidentified senior government specialist told the newspaper. President Bush, after a briefing by the CIA, ordered his national security team to give nuclear terrorism priority over every other threat to the United States, the newspaper reported. As a consequence, the report said, the Bush administration has installed hundreds of sophisticated radioactivity detectors at U.S. border inspection points and around the nation's capital. National laboratories have been ordered to develop even more sensitive detectors, according to the report. The elite commando unit, the Delta Force, has been placed on standby alert to seize any nuclear materials that are detected, the Post said. The heightened fears of the use of nuclear materials along with reported threats of a terrorist attack bigger than Sept. 11 explain the decision to maintain a cadre of senior federal managers on standby outside of Washington, the Post said of its initial disclosure of the precautions on Friday. The CIA told Bush at one point of not only the published arrests by Pakistan of two former nuclear scientists who visited reputed terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden, but of a third Pakistani scientist who, the newspaper said, tried to sell a nuclear bomb to Libya. The likeliest source for terrorists of nuclear materials, the paper said, was the crumbling nuclear industry infrastructure in the former Soviet Union, despite the insistence of Russian officials that all such materials are accounted for. Theft of nuclear byproducts have been reported frequently, the Post said, noting that in 1995 Chechen rebels placed a functional "dirty bomb" in a Moscow park but did not detonate it. Al Qaida has its own contacts with Chechen rebels, the paper said. .... Now we have to wear lead underwear *and* tinfoil hats? At least the galvanic reaction makes us feel all tingly...
