October 30, 2001
Ashcroft Warns of Terror Attacks Soon Against U.S.
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM and DAVID JOHNSTON
ASHINGTON, Oct. 29 — The government warned tonight that new terrorist attacks were planned against the United States in the next week, but no specifics were offered about the nature of the attacks or what the targets might be.
"The administration views this information as credible," Attorney General John Ashcroft said. "But unfortunately, it does not contain specific information as to the type of attack or specific targets."
What Mr. Ashcroft called a "terrorist threat advisory" went out to 18,000 state and local law enforcement agencies. But no specific advice was given about what these police forces should do in the face of the threat.
One senior government official said that the warning appeared to arise from new threats from Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, but offered no evidence.
Another official said tonight that the warning was the product of both human and other types of intelligence about conversations that used language similar to what had been heard in intelligence intercepts before Sept. 11. There had been an increase, the official said, in the number of these references and the violence of the language used.
As a result, he said, the administration chose a conservative course and put out a general warning, although there was not full agreement in the government about whether that was the right thing to do.
The government issued a similar alert on Oct. 11, and no attack followed. Robert S. Mueller III, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said tonight that the earlier alert "may well have helped to avert such an attack."
The alert came at the end of a day when officials announced another case of skin anthrax in New Jersey, and federal officials said anthrax was found in the mailrooms of three more government buildings — the Supreme Court, the State Department and a building on Independence Avenue that has offices for the Voice of America and agencies of the Department of Health and Human Services. Because anthrax was found in a Supreme Court mail center in Maryland last week, the justices sat at another location today for the first time since the court building opened in 1935.
In addition, traces of anthrax were found in a small research office of the Department of Agriculture in downtown Washington, a department spokesman said.
In New Jersey, officials described the person who contracted skin anthrax as a 51-year-old woman who worked in a small accounting firm not far from the Hamilton Township mail processing center, which handled several anthrax-tainted letters, She is the first person among the recent anthrax cases who neither works for the government nor is connected to a media company.
Federal health officials said that tens of thousands of Americans were now taking antibiotics to guard against anthrax infection and that from now on an older medicine, doxycycline, would be recommended instead of Cipro, a drug whose patent is controlled by the German pharmaceutical company Bayer A.G.
Law enforcement authorities have developed a range of theories to explain the spread of anthrax along the Eastern Seaboard, but they said they still had no idea who sent the potentially deadly bacteria through the mails or how many letters might have been sent.
Before today's terrorism alert was issued, President Bush called the first meeting of his Homeland Security Council, made up of top officials involved in antiterrorism matters, and announced the creation of a "foreign terrorist tracking force" to crack down on potential terrorists from abroad who are in the United States.
Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Mueller spoke briefly to reporters in the auditorium at the Justice Department and had no suggestions about what Americans should do in response to the new warning except to exercise "vigilance."
"We have decided to share with the American people that we have alerted law enforcement," Mr. Ashcroft said. "We think this gives people a basis for continuing to live their lives the way they would otherwise live them, with this elevated sense of alertness or vigilance."
A reporter asked the officials whether they were concerned about crying wolf — that if no attack occurred this time, Americans might not take the alerts seriously next time.
Americans, Mr. Ashcroft replied, should not be lulled "into a false sense of indifference."
He added: "It's important for the American people to understand that these are to be taken seriously, but by taking them seriously on a continuing basis, we can have the good outcome of avoiding very serious additional terrorist problems."
After the alert on Oct. 11, police officials around the country complained that the warning was far too vague to help them and served mainly to drain manpower from other urgent tasks.
Mr. Mueller seemed to speak to those complaints tonight. "I know how difficult it is," he said, for "state and local officers out there to respond without greater detail."
Still, he added: "I believe it is advisable to alert law enforcement and local authorities as to what knowledge we have received. We are asking them and, through them, local communities to remain extremely vigilant. Doing so gives us a force multiplier that could well prevent another terrorist attack."
Counterterrorism officials said that the issue of whether to issue an alert was discussed today at a meeting that included representatives from the F.B.I., C.I.A., Homeland Security Council and other agencies. The threat of further Al Qaeda violence was based on information from overseas that was obtained by an American intelligence agency, a government official said.
The discussion at the meeting centered in part on the wisdom of issuing an opaque warning balanced against the risk of unduly alarming the public and overtaxing state and local law enforcement agencies without providing any specifics about the possible nature of the danger or location of an attack.
The information, like that on which the earlier warning was based, was taken seriously because it came from an intelligence source that has proved reliable in the past, officials said, and therefore could not be lightly dismissed.
Like the intelligence that led to the earlier threat advisory, the information behind today's alert stood out from the stream of threats and warnings received by law enforcement and intelligence agencies each day, the officials said. Those threats often include highly specific information, but are almost always determined to be false.
Mr. Mueller said he had no reason to believe that the new threat was related to the anthrax attacks. This seemed to be a slight change from his suggestion after the last alert was issued that there might be some connection between the earlier advisory and the anthrax mailings.
As matters now stand, inhaled anthrax, a serious and sometimes fatal illness, has been diagnosed in eight people — six postal workers and two employees of American Media Inc., a tabloid newspaper company in Florida. Three of these people have died, one has been released from the hospital and four are hospitalized in serious condition.
With the New Jersey case, and an additional one in New York City, there have been nine cases of cutaneous, or skin anthrax, which is less serious than the inhaled variety.
The amount of anthrax found in Washington in the last few days was in such trace amounts that officials said workers were not in danger of contracting the disease.
At the State Department, where traces of anthrax were found in the mailroom, the risk seemed so low that President Bush was allowed to give a speech there this morning to African trade ministers. The mailroom is across the street from the State Department headquarters where the president spoke.
Still, the Supreme Court, where anthrax was found in the mailroom on Friday, was closed for the first time since the building across the street from the Capitol opened in 1935, and the justices sat today in a federal court building several blocks away. Court officials said the justices would not be back in their offices until Wednesday at the earliest.
Tonight, senators said that the Hart Building, where about 50 senators have their offices, might be sealed shut for the next several weeks so it could be decontaminated with chlorine dioxide, a powerful gas.
For Education And Discussion Only. Not For Commercial Use.
