American terrorist attacks
One threat, made during a snowstorm in Kansas City, Missouri, resulted in 20 people being made to leave a Planned Parenthood Clinic. american terrorist attacks Terrorism in the world. They then endured an outdoor shower and scrub-down (with their clothes on) in freezing temperatures. By March, Neil Gallagher, assistant director of the FBI's national security division, reflected on the Bureau's frustration: "Not a day goes by without us hearing from somewhere in the United States about an anthrax threat" (Deseret News, March 3, 1999). By May, sending a letter or making a phone call claiming to have spread anthrax seemed to have surpassed the time-tested phoned-in bomb threat in popularity. american terrorist attacks Terrorism in spain eta. Reports of anthrax hoaxes were averaging more than one a day, and had disrupted the lives of more than 10,000 presumed victims. So how did anthrax hoaxes become so popular? Was it the success of the hoax at B'nai B'rith? Did would-be hoaxers pick up on dire government warnings of apocalyptic events? Were they influenced by imaginative novels like The Cobra Event, or did they get the idea at the movies? Or was it the result of some local TV station's sweeps-week story touting how easily the water supply might be contaminated?We all remember Defense Secretary William Cohen, a 5-pound bag of Domino sugar in his hand, claiming that an equal amount of anthrax would wipe out half the population of Washington. And did the military's controversial decision to vaccinate U. american terrorist attacks Terrorism philppines. S. troops against anthrax give the threat a special cachet?Anthrax was mentioned as a possible Iraqi weapon during the Gulf War in 1991. But interest in it faded quickly after the war. In the mid-1990s, however, U. N. weapons inspectors expressed suspicion that Iraq might still be harboring anthrax weapons. Also in 1995, chemical terrorism captured headlines when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin, a nerve agent, in the Tokyo subway. Meanwhile, the Pentagon had begun to lump biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons into an inclusive new category as "WMD," or "weapons of mass destruction. " These threats, reportedly brandished by an assortment of "rogue states," also helped the Pentagon, not inconveniently, justify its still sizable post-Cold War military budget. Still, on the domestic front, official Washington remained unconcerned. On February 22, 1996, a spokesman for the Defense Intelligence Agency told the Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence that his agency knew of no terrorist organizations that were actually "developing chemical, biological, or radiological weapons. " Similarly, an FBI spokesman said that the Bureau was unaware of any bioweapons threat from any international or domestic groups. But things change. In May 1997, within days of the anthrax hoax at B'nai B'rith, FBI director Louis Freeh offered a very different view. The acquisition or use of biological or other weapons of mass destruction by individuals or terrorist groups, he said, "constitutes one of the gravest threats to the United States. "Stories about the threat of germ warfare and bioterrorism, often naming anthrax as a likely weapon, began to appear with greater frequency: The New York Times publishes an annual index listing the stories it prints by category. There were 27 stories in the Times's "Biological and Chemical Warfare" category in 1994. By 1998, there were 278. Then, too, the media often treated stories about hoaxes as if they involved real germs. This was especially true in February 1998, when two men suspected of carrying vials of anthrax were arrested in Las Vegas. The material turned out to be a harmless vaccine, but government officials and the press reacted as if the men were carrying the genuine article. The result was a spate of stories about how easy it was to develop bioweapons, how devastating they were, and how vulnerable the country was. Anthrax was usually touted as the "bioagent most likely. "Bioterrorism movies like "Outbreak," and novels like The Eleventh Plague (not to be confused with my own nonfiction book of the same name) mixed fact and fiction in ways that obscured the lines between fantasy and legitimate worry.
American terrorist attacks
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