Posted on 03/03/2002 7:15:24 AM PST by TheRedSoxWinThePennant
OCTOBER BULLETIN SAID AL-QAEDA TERRORISTS THOUGHT TO HAVE 10 KILOTON NUCLEAR WEAPON TO BE SMUGGLED INTO NEW YORK CITY Sun Mar 03 2002 10:40:24 ET **TIME MAGAZINE**
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.
Publishing sources tell the DRUDGE REPORT, the next cover story of TIME will headline: "Can We Stop the Next 9/11?"
The report hits newsstands Monday, March 4th.
MORE
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.
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Under the aegis of the White House’s 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.
Counterterrorism experts and government officials interviewed by TIME say that for all the relative calm since Sept. 11, America’s luck will probably run out again, sooner or later. "It's going to be worse, and a lot of people are going to die," warns one U.S. counterterrorism official. "I don't think there's a damn thing we're going to be able to do about it."
The DRUDGE REPORT has been briefed on other revelations coming from TIME's investigation:
The Coast Guard is arming itself against a possible terrorist attempt to destroy a major U.S. coastal city by detonating a tanker loaded with liquified natural gas.
The Administration has recalled old CIA hands with experience in Central Asia. Says an Administration official: "You ended up going back to retirees because the bench was so light on Afghanistan. We’re still trying to get up to speed."
This week, Tom Ridge’s office plans to announce a new color-coded alert system to warn local law enforcement and the public about threats within U.S. borders, sources tell TIME.
While there is a genuine debate inside the government about whether Osama bin Laden is still alive, there is far less argument about what will happen after Washington is able to confirm that he is dead. A U.S. official told TIME last week that it is widely presumed that al-Qaeda sleeper cells will take retaliatory action once the terrorist leader is killed or proven dead.
"We're as vulnerable today as we were on 9/10 or 9/12," says presidential counselor Karen Hughes. "We just know more."
Developing...
Don't bank on it. From the Potassium Iodide FAQ section on Q: Is Iodized Salt, Tincture of Iodine, Water Purification Tabs, or other Iodine Sources Effective?:
Kelp Tablets...hardly. Solgar® Kelp Tablets, for example, contain only 225 MICROGRAMS of iodine! (Fortunately, it is also available in a 1000 tablet bottle, unfortunately though, you'd need to be swallowing 442 of them per day and not wander too far from a bathroom!)
I urge everyone to view the rest of the text there, it addresses everything from sea salt to water purification (iodine) tablets. The information is vital to anyone considering such things as alternatives, as the results vary from ineffective to deadly.
Possibly viable alternatives including topical application are described on the Plan "B" for anyone caught without KI or KIO3 tablets in a nuclear emergency page.
New York would be far greater catastrophe than Washington...Our financial markets are the back bone of liquidity for the corporations of this country....it would be devestating. The loss would be measured in thousands of trillions...this country would freeze.
It represents the antithesis of their medieval luddite mentality: commerce, finance, technology, prosperity, and that extremely non-islamic statue in the harbor.
Besides that, get stuffed, you lost your guns or had to bury them, chicken squawker. Go get even more drunk, that's always worked for ya in the past.
The silly part about nuclear deterrance is you need to be able to threaten your advesary with a reprisal for it to work. But if it is a terrorist organization, you cannot threaten anything worth while to make them scared enough not to attack you. Quite a conundrum the US faces here. Any ideas on what a US response should be? Maybe the terrorists will go after LA next!
Given her design, training, networking, sustaining and direction of terrorist worldwide, it would seem we already have our answer to this question.
Ah, the beauty -- and absolute immunity -- of being a "former Soviet".
As I recall it was also reported that the "radiological bomb" story was a cover story, and that it was actually a tactical nuke.
Nuclear deterrence was beautiful when you had 2 Superpowers who could destroy each other several times over. It worked. Although you cant prove someting that didnt work in logical thought. Nuclear deterrence was a gambit that compelled the Soviets, successfully, not to launch or they would be annihilated.
Nuclear deterrence, the concept and strategy really doesnt apply in this case as the terrorists dont have the capability to devastate us strategically. And as you say, they really dont have anything to value to be deterred. There lives, as they live them are of little value, but make no mistake, if we are nuked we will retaliate vs the 1)terrorists groups with tactical nukes 2)and the same vs. the terrorist supporting countries. The links arent that difficult: Hamas, Hizballah, Islamic Jihad - we know who supplies and trains them...BAM.
Trucks? Don't be silly. We need to load them into boats so that we can ship them to Oz, so that you can demonstrate to the rest of the world just how civilized folks really can coexist with brutal medieval savages.
It's a sad spectacle when you post after falling out of your bottle.
Satellites are waiting.
But whether anyone knows or not, the Clinton legacy PDD-60 says absorb first strikes and do not retaliate immediately. Has Bush decided to overrule this? We know nothing as yet.
The Time report, outlined by Drudge, is simply scratching the surface. Ordinarily, the U.S. wouldn't beging taking such extraordinary preparations on a single report (even after 9-11), unless the source was deemed highly credible, or there was other reporting that hasn't been leaked to the press. My guess--and it's only a hunch--is that the stolen nuke possibility turned up in other intel reporting as well. The question now becomes what other intelligence data--if any--may have supported the alert, and what additional details was provided by this reporting. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that the gov't knows more than it's telling the public.
Beyond that, the nuclear threat is clearly continuing. Keeping Delta and NEST teams deployed is (again) a very telling development. You don't keep those folks on hair-trigger alert for months on end without credible evidence of a possible nuclear terrorism threat.
One final thought: the Marine Corps has assumed a primary role in responding to potential domestic NBC threats. I know the Marines were conducting an "urban terrorism" drill in Little Rock last week. It would be interesting--and potentially instructive--to learn if any of the USMC's NBC teams were in Little Rock, and their travel patterns over the last 4-5 months.
Time's report represents the tip of the iceberg. Keep a close eye on this one, folks. There are more alarming details yet to come...
If the terrs knew that any nuclear strike against the US would result in their treasured kaaba being reduced to vapors, regardless of which islamohole the terrs in question called "home", it would serve as a deterrent.
Do we have the national will to enforce such a policy? I don't think so.
Good riddance too.
Yeah.
The terrorists who carried out the attacks are dead, the organisation who sent them has been smashed, and the country that hosted that organisation has been reduced to rubble.
But don't let the facts interfere with a good anti-Arab racist vent, eh, Matamoros?
Thanks, DD.
If one had the time, and an accounting-type mind, it would be a revealing exercise to try and find out who's making money out of the Rolling Fear campaign. The media, defense industries, 'security' contractors; it must be in the hundreds of billions by now. Any guesses as to what they'll come up with when the nuke thing runs out of steam? Some of our fellow Freepers would buy an Al Qaeda-homicidal space aliens alliance scenario, yes?
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