Calling Mr. Cheney
: Gary Farber at the impossibly named blog amygdalagf blog tells us just where the shadow government his hiding. For this he, meanwhile, is being flown to Club Fed as we speak.
Fun City
: A fun report on More than Zero on NY’s Blogfest.
More nuke nightmares
: Now add this to your nuclear nightmares: Time reports that in October, intelligence said that bin Laden had stolen a nuclear weapon from the Soviets and that it was destined for New York City. The government told no one.
They had made a chilling realization: if terrorists did manage to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the city, there was almost nothing anyone could do about it.
In the days after Sept. 11, doomsday scenarios like a nuclear attack on Manhattan suddenly seemed plausible. But during the six months that followed, as the U.S. struck back and the anthrax scare petered out and the fires at Ground Zero finally died down, the national nightmare about another calamitous terrorist strike went away.
The terrorists did not. 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 a U.S. counterterrorism official. “I don’t think there’s a damn thing we’re going to be able to do about it.” The government is so certain of another attack that it has assigned 100 civilian government officials to 24-hour rotations in underground bunkers, in a program that became known last week as the “shadow government,” ready to take the reins if the next megaterror target turns out to be Washington.
Add this to the items yesterday (below) with the Washington Post hinting that nuclear terrorism is nearer than we think. The government has created a shadow government in case. The goverment has stepped up its monitoring for nuclear devices coming into the country.
The government is clearly worried about nuclear weapons. So am I.
Islamic hate squads
: Barry Rosen, a hostage in Iran 20 years ago, writes in Beliefnet that the death of Daniel Pearl brought back frightening memories:
When the news broke that Daniel Pearl’s final words before getting gruesomely murdered by Muslim terrorists were “My father is Jewish, my mother is Jewish, I am a Jew,” I started to go through one of my infrequent but emotionally downward spirals. I am certain that other Americans were deeply impacted by The Wall Street Journal reporter’s horrific death, but I feel an unimaginably strong affinity with himóboth because I am a Jew and I was a victim of a cruel hostage crisis: More than twenty years ago, I was the American press attachÈ in Teheran and one of the 52 Americans held hostage for 444 days…
He threw a piece of paper on the deskóthe sheet on which I was to write my confessionóand said, “Admit it, you are a Jewish spy, you work for Jerusalem, and you head a ring of spies. You have ten seconds to answer. If you don’t, we’ll shoot your head off.”
Remember anthrax?
: The head of the FBI defends his go-nowhere investigation of the anthrax attacks. What’s the defense? The murderer is still out there.
