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Fighting terror notebook
Compiled from Times wires Bush will offer public vaccine for smallpoxWASHINGTON -- President Bush will make the smallpox vaccine available to all Americans on a voluntary basis to guard against a bioterrorist attack, senior administration officials said Wednesday. As a first step, the president will order military personnel to begin getting smallpox vaccinations and will launch a plan to offer the vaccine to 500,000 emergency medical workers and response teams within weeks, the officials said. The public will be offered the vaccine on a voluntary basis as soon as large stockpiles are licensed, probably early in 2004. Bush will announce his plan Friday. Bush talked about the broad outlines of his plan Wednesday on ABC's World News Tonight. "I think it ought to be voluntary," Bush said of the civilian part of the plan. "It's going to be very important for us to make sure there's ample information for people to make a wise decision." Newspaper: Al-Qaida obtained VX in IraqWASHINGTON -- The Bush administration has received a credible report that Islamic extremists affiliated with al-Qaida took possession of a chemical weapon in Iraq last month or late in October, the Washington Post reported, quoting two unnamed officials with firsthand knowledge of the report and its source. The officials said government analysts suspect that the transaction involved the nerve agent VX and that a courier managed to smuggle it overland through Turkey. If the report proves true, the transaction marks two significant milestones. It would be the first known acquisition of a nonconventional weapon other than cyanide by al-Qaida or a member of its network. It also would be the most concrete evidence to support the charge, aired for months by President Bush and his advisers, that al-Qaida terrorists receive material assistance in Iraq. U.S. analysts have no evidence that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein knew about or authorized such a transaction, the Post reported the officials as saying. U.S. accounts for people detained after Sept. 11WASHINGTON -- The vast majority of the more than 900 people the federal government acknowledges detaining after the Sept. 11 attacks have been deported, released or convicted of relatively minor crimes not directly related to terrorism, government documents show. At the request of the Associated Press, the Justice Department provided its most thorough public accounting of the people arrested in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. Only six of the 765 people arrested by the federal government on immigration violations still are held by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The rest have been deported or are free in the United States awaiting a final decision on whether they can stay. An additional 134 people were charged with criminal offenses, with 99 found guilty through pleas or trials. Many of the crimes bear no connection to terrorism. Also ...ANTHRAX DECONTAMINATION: More than a year after anthrax killed two workers in the main mail handling center for the capital, decontamination work involving chlorine dioxide gas is to begin Saturday. The 17.5-million-cubic-foot Brentwood facility in Washington has been closed since October 2001, when anthrax-laced letters to members of Congress were processed there. MUSLIM LINKED TO BOMBING LEAVES GERMANY: A German convert to Islam who was investigated in connection with the April bombing of a synagogue in Tunisia left Germany last month, German prosecutors in Berlin said Wednesday. According to German officials, Christian Ganczarski, 35, received a call from the driver of a truck laden with heating gas shortly before it exploded at a historic synagogue in Djerba, Tunisia, killing the driver and 19 other people, including 14 German tourists. During the call, which was intercepted by German intelligence, driver Nizar Naouar was asked by Ganczarski if he needed anything and replied, "I only need the command," German officials said. German police briefly detained and questioned Ganczarski after the bombing, but released him without charge, citing a lack of sufficient evidence to go to trial.
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From the Times wire desk
From the AP |
