NO INTEL FOR ‘DIRTY BOMB’ THREAT

Homeland Security offi­cials were ter­ri­fied of a poten­tial “dirty” bomb attack over the New Year’s hol­i­day — even though they had no intel­li­gence sug­gest­ing such an attack.
According to the Washington Post, “the U.S. gov­ern­ment last month dis­patched scores of casu­ally dressed nuclear sci­en­tists with sophis­ti­cated radi­a­tion detec­tion equip­ment hid­den in brief­cases and golf bags to scour five major U.S. cities for radi­o­log­i­cal, or ‘dirty,’ bombs.”

The atten­tion to a poten­tial dirty bomb, for exam­ple, resulted not from spe­cific recent infor­ma­tion indi­cat­ing such an attack but from the belief among offi­cials that al Qaeda is spar­ing no effort to try to det­o­nate one.
The ter­ror­ism cri­sis began late on Dec. 19, when ana­lysts assem­bled what they described as extremely spe­cific intel­li­gence, includ­ing elec­tronic inter­cepts of al Qaeda oper­a­tives’ tele­phone calls or e-​​mails. One fear was that al Qaeda would hijack and crash an over­seas flight into a U.S. city or the ocean. Another was that ter­ror­ists would shoot down an air­liner with a shoulder-​​fired mis­sile.
U.S. offi­cials also became con­cerned that a large, open-​​air New Year’s Eve cel­e­bra­tion might be tar­geted. While the perime­ters of foot­ball sta­di­ums can gen­er­ally be secured, out­door cel­e­bra­tions are much more vul­ner­a­ble, they said.
One of the U.S. offi­cials’ main fears was of a dirty bomb, in which a con­ven­tional bomb is det­o­nated and spews radioac­tive mate­r­ial and radi­a­tion across a small area. Security spe­cial­ists say such a weapon is unlikely to cause mass casu­al­ties but could cause panic and dev­as­tate a local econ­omy.
On the same day that Ridge raised the national threat level to orange (“high”) from yel­low (“ele­vated”), the Homeland Security Department sent out large fixed radi­a­tion detec­tors and hun­dreds of pager-​​size radi­a­tion mon­i­tors for use by police in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Detroit. (empha­sis mine)

January 7th, 2004 | Homeland Security | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.