'Dirty Bomb' Threat Was Big New Year's Eve Worry

With huge New Year's Eve celebrations and college football bowl games only days away, 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, according to officials involved in the emergency effort.

Rank	Location	Receipts	Donors/Avg	Freepers/Avg	Monthlies
46	Norway	50.00	1	50.00	14	3.57

Even now, hundreds of nuclear and bioweapons scientists remain on high alert at several military bases around the country, ready to fly to any trouble spot. Pharmaceutical stockpiles for responding to biological attacks are on transportable trucks at key U.S. military bases.
Officials said intelligence can be misleading, and some in law enforcement acknowledged that there is no way to know the actual urgency of the threats. Officials said one of their key challenges is determining whether al Qaeda is planting provocative but false clues as a diversion or as deliberate disinformation to test the U.S. response. Some foreign governments have voiced concerns that the United States is overreacting.
In recent days, intelligence has become even more difficult to sort through, officials said yesterday, because of what one described as "circular" repeating of information that has been made public.
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...

Well, overreaction or not, this story makes me feel more secure. It shows that they really are on top of the most likely threats. Even if there was no specific information about dirty bombs, the fact that they were able to fan out & do a good search for them means that al Qaeda cannot assume they have a free ride into their target site, at least if the target is a well-known mass gathering. (If they drive directly in from the country on a normal workday I guess they still would have a shot. No defense is perfect.)

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