WASHINGTON/KABUL (REUTERS) — The United States waged its war against terror on two fronts on Thursday, bombing targets in Afghanistan and hunting at home for the shadowy figures who have spread anthrax and anxiety through the U.S. mail.
U.S. warplanes seeking to crush Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban and Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda network carried out their 12th day of raids, unleashing what one Kabul resident called a “doomsday” of death and destruction.
The Taliban, harboring al Qaeda that is accused of being behind the suicide-hijack attacks against the United States on Sept. 11, said the U.S.-led raids had killed up to 900 people so far and left thousands wounded.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said nowhere near that number of civilians had been killed in the campaign to destroy the network blamed for nearly 5,400 deaths when hijacked aircraft were crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
On the U.S. home front, the government offered a $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest and conviction of those responsible for mailing anthrax bacteria that have infected six people this month — one of whom died.
Letters accompanying two of the anthrax mailings indicated they were linked to the Sept. 11 attacks, and Attorney General John Ashcroft said the spate of infections could be an organized conspiracy.
“We can’t say, ‘Yes this is part of the terrorist network’ … (but) we can’t rule out that they’re associated with the attacks of Sept. 11,” Ashcroft said in an interview on MSNBC.
But he added: “It appears as if there are some similarities between some of the most serious of the offenses that indicates that they might be … a part of a unified organized effort, an effort either by a single individual or else an effort conducted in concert with someone else.”
NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, to whom a letter containing bacteria was addressed, said during his nightly news broadcast that the brief letter referred to Sept. 11 and read: “This is next. Take penicillin (sic) now. Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is Great.”
Brokaw said another letter sent to Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle also referred to Sept. 11 and said: “You can not stop us. We have this anthrax.”
Anxiety over anthrax — there have been nearly 40 cases of infection or exposure this month — briefly spread to nuclear safety when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant was put on top alert.
Officials later dismissed the threat, but the incident at the site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history 22 years ago jangled nerves already frayed by last month’s attacks.
A CBS employee who works with TV News anchor Dan Rather in New York tested positive for skin anthrax on Thursday, making CBS the third major network to be exposed to the disease after NBC and ABC.
In New Jersey, where two of the anthrax-containing letters were postmarked, a postal worker also tested positive.
