'Dirty bomb' feared before New Year's
WASHINGTON -- With huge New Year's Eve celebrations and college football bowl games only days away, the US government dispatched scores of casually dressed nuclear scientists with sophisticated radiation-detection equipment hidden in briefcases and golf bags to scour five major US cities for radiological or "dirty bombs," according to officials involved in the effort.
The call-up of Department of Energy radiation specialists to Washington, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Baltimore was the first since the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. It was conducted in secret, in contrast to the very public cancellation of 15 commercial flights from France, Britain, and Mexico, the other major counterterror response of the holiday season.
The new details of the government's search for a dirty bomb help explain why officials have used such dire terms to describe the reasons for the nation's fifth "code orange" alert, issued Dec. 21 by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. US officials said they remain worried today -- in many cases, more concerned than much of the American public realizes -- that their countermeasures would fall short.
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 to treat biological attacks were loaded on transportable trucks at key US bases.
Officials said intelligence can be 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 false clues as a diversion or as deliberate disinformation to test the US 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, because of what one official described yesterday 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.
On the same day that Ridge raised the national threat level to orange or "high," from yellow or "elevated," the Homeland Security Department sent large fixed radiation detectors and hundreds of pager-sized radiation monitors for use by police in Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Chicago, Houston, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, and Detroit.
