A L S O__T O D A Y Femme fatale By Virginia Vitzthum Is Clinton our first female president? T A B L E+T A L K Will the U.S. ever have a viable third party? Join the partisan debate in Table Talk's Politics area R E C E N T L Y Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill ... By Mark Hertsgaard Using the impeachment drama as a diversionary tactic, anti-environmental forces have attached a series of dangerous "riders" to last-minute funding bills (10/07/98) The fixer By Murray Waas How Kenneth Starr's law partner covertly worked for six years to trap President Clinton in a sex scandal (10/06/98) Mistakes were made By Gene Lyons What Ken Starr Forgot: the Law (10/05/98) Sex scandals can be contagious By Aisiah Abdullah Letter from Kuala Lumpur (10/02/98) Scaife tells why he cut off Spectator's funding By Murray Waas Why Scaife cut off funds to the Arkansas Project: Reclusive billionaire points the finger at fellow Arkansas Project conspirators in testimony before the grand jury (10/01/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.
		-------The billion-dollar rumor How unsubstantiated reports that the World Trade bombers may have included nerve gas in their arsenal led to some pretty pricey public policy. BY JEFF STEIN It began as rumor, then became fact. Fact became alarm. And alarm led to a rallying cry for a multimillion-dollar federal program that has now itself ricocheted out of control. Kenneth Starr's investigation of President Clinton? No, it's the federal budget for countering a doomsday attack by terrorists armed with chemical and biological weapons. The rumor in this case was that terrorists had put deadly sodium cyanide into the monstrous February 1993 World Trade Center bomb that killed six people, injured more than 1,000, blasted a seven-story hole underneath the twin towers and created panic in the streets of lower Manhattan. The blast should have turned any sodium cyanide present into hydrogen cyanide, unleashing a poisonous cloud that could have instantly killed hundreds or thousands more people. That is, had any sodium cyanide been there. According to a thorough, as yet unpublished study of the incident by an arms-control think tank at the Monterey Institute for International Studies, there is no evidence to support the long-swirling assertion, which first surfaced in the solemn pronouncement of a respected federal judge in 1994. The rumor then made its way into scores of newspaper articles and was cited by leading U.S. senators to support anti-terrorist initiatives that have amounted to billions of dollars, many of them unaccounted for, according to a recent investigation by congressional auditors. John Parachini, a senior associate at the Monterey Institute, made a draft of the study available after being contacted by Salon. Word of his findings has been circulating in the community of Washington terrorism experts. "I'm not against spending money for defending against chemical and biological weapons," Parachini said in an interview, "but we ought to know why we're spending for it, and to get the facts straight." In his study, Parachini noted that the World Trade Center bombers considered using chemical weapons, but did not -- an important fact for government terrorism specialists to ponder. "Examining the motivations and behaviors of terrorists who would have used a chemical weapon if it was available, but did not, may offer important lessons about how to thwart such attacks in the future," he writes. Parachini traced the origins of the cyanide gas story to the first trial of World Trade Center bombers in 1994, when federal prosecutors raised the specter of a chemical bomb, no doubt to darken the jury's view of the defendants. The theme was picked up by presiding federal Judge Kevin Duffy in his sentencing statement to the stone-faced defendants. "You had sodium cyanide around, and I'm sure it was in the bomb," the judge intoned. "Thank God the sodium cyanide burned instead of vaporizing. If the sodium cyanide had vaporized, it is clear what would have happened is the cyanide gas would have been sucked into the north tower and everybody in the north tower would have been killed. That to my mind is exactly what was intended." N E X T+P A G E+| How the rumor started - - - - - - - - - - - - PHOTO AP/WIDE WORLD