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Destroyer HMS York spotted the vessel around ten miles inside the disputed “oil zone” around the South Atlantic islands. The Royal Navy has intercepted an Argentinian warship near British waters in an apparent escalation of the row over the Falkland Islands. The British crew had to radio the Argentinian ship, a smaller corvette named ARA Drummond, to demand that it change its course. Sources told The Sun that the ship made an “innocent navigational blunder” and were embarrassed about the mistake. It is believed that the Drummond was spotted sailing alongside a French fleet before it broke away and headed...

U.S. defense officials say a Navy vessel that is part of the new piracy task force intercepted and searched an Iranian-owned ship that officials feared was carrying arms to Hamas. It's unclear whether those suspicions were founded. Two defense officials say the Cypriot-flagged commercial vessel was tracked by a U.S. Navy ship in the Red Sea over the weekend. One official says it was boarded with the consent of the vessel's crew on Monday and Tuesday. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record. The search turned up ammunition that included artillery...

SAN DIEGO – A member of a notorious Salvadoran street gang who was deported from the United States six years ago has been intercepted by U.S. Border Patrol agents while trying to slip back into the country. The 34-year-old Salvadoran national was caught Monday afternoon near the Tecate border crossing, along with an illegal immigrant from Guatemala, said Border Patrol spokesman Mark Endicott. The Salvadoran, whose name was not released, is both an admitted and documented member of Mara Salvatrucha, also known as MS-13. He has a lengthy criminal history and was deported in February 2002 after serving time in...

MIAMI - The FBI intercepted more than 300,000 calls during a nearly decade-long investigation into a purported Islamic extremist support cell that suspected al-Qaida operative Jose Padilla eventually joined, an agent told jurors Tuesday. The tapes form the backbone of the federal case against Padilla and his two suspected co-conspirators, Adham Amin Hassoun and Kifah Wael Jayyousi. Jurors in the trial of the three men are expected to begin hearing the tapes and reading translations from Arabic to English in the coming days. Prosecutors say they will show that Hassoun, Jayyousi and others plotted — often using code words —...

See for example this thread first. Over the course of the past couple of weeks, a large scandal has broken concerning the efforts of unscrupulous, highly-placed individuals to gain access to the private phone records and conversations of dissenters. The rights of these dissenters are guaranteed by law. Does this sound familiar? Are you thinking of the words “NSA interecpt / wiretap program?” If you are, then we are not connecting here. I am speaking of the recent controversy regarding some of the corporate executives at Hewlett-Packard, and their attempts to unearth the source of leaks of corporate secrets (or...

NAPLES, Italy, Aug. 27, 2006 – U.S. Navy frigate USS Boone intercepted a drug-smuggling speedboat Aug. 24 while enroute from Algeria to Spain during a patrol of the Mediterranean Sea south of the Spanish coastline. According to U.S. Navy 6th Fleet officials, the crew abandoned its cargo—five packages of marijuana weighing 90 kilograms--when the USS Boone was sighted and entered Algerian territorial water. The Boone’s crew confiscated the marijuana. A few hours later, near the same location, the USS Boone encountered two small rubber boats in apparent distress, officials said. The ship approached the boats and found 26 people on...

Writing the history of our time in song."We killed the Patriot Act" MIDI - VIDEO KILLED THE RADIO STAR - the Buggles, all the way at the bottom All he cares about is winning an election He would hurt our chance at terrorist detection This guy is as bad as private parts infection Ooh ah ooh Hey, Nevada, you should really be embarrassed He has his white flag just like the guys in Paris To the Muslims we must always be the fairest Ooh ah ooh...this guy's a weenie Ooh ah ooh...a real weenie Harry Reid killed the Patriot Act...Harry...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

More than 120,000 hours of intercepted conversations amassed by the FBI during America's war against terrorism have yet to be translated and in some cases have been destroyed, a government investigation has found.Although more linguists have been recruited since the September 11 attacks, the FBI's counter-terrorism operation is so short of Arabic and Farsi speakers that the agency is drowning in untranslated recordings and documents. The backlog is so large that the FBI's digital audio archives have been automatically deleting older recordings, including al-Qa'eda-related material, before they have been reviewed by translators, to make room for new material. Only two...

The road to Sept. 11 ATHENS When the hubbub about what the White House did or didn't know before Sept. 11 dies down, Congressional or other investigators should consider the specific warnings that friendly Arab intelligence services sent to Washington in the summer of 2001. Jordan and probably Morocco advised U.S. and allied intelligence that Al Qaeda terrorists controlled by Osama bin Laden planned major airborne terrorist operations in the continental United States. After verifying the authenticity and content of those messages, Washington-based investigators should find out how seriously they were considered and what defensive operational conclusions, if any, were...

At the northern edge of The Pit, Port Authority officers, city cops and firefighters were raking through the last of the debris, still finding fragments of bone. At the opposite corner, ironworkers were preparing to cut the last erect piece of steel, a 36-foot-tall girder that had stood at the core of the south tower."Column 1001 B," said Lt. John Ryan, commander of the PA police recovery task force.Ryan pointed out the evenly spaced rectangles where the exterior columns had been. The rectangles marked off an acre in ghostly gray dirt where the tower once stood.There's one," Ryan said.He pointed...

WASHINGTON A secretive U.S. spy agency monitored phone calls between the suspected organizer of the Sept. 11 suicide hijackings and the chief hijacker, but did not share the information with other agencies, U.S. officials said yesterday. The officials said on condition of anonymity that the conversations between Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and Mohamed Atta were intercepted by the National Security Agency, which monitors and decodes foreign communications. Mohammed is a known leader of Osama Bin Laden's Al Qaeda network and is on the FBI's Most Wanted List. He is thought to be hiding in Pakistan or Afghanistan. In addition to...

US Heard 'Tomorrow Is Zero Hour' on Eve of Attacks June 19— By Tabassum Zakaria WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence intercepted two messages the day before the Sept. 11 attacks that indicated an event was planned the following day, but the communications were not translated until Sept. 12, government sources said on Wednesday.The National Security Agency, which eavesdrops on communications worldwide, intercepted messages that said "tomorrow is zero hour" and "the match begins tomorrow," sources said on condition of anonymity.The agency did not translate the messages, which were in Arabic, until Sept. 12 -- the day after hijacked airliners...

WASHINGTON (AP) - Intelligence agencies aren't sure if a conversation in Arabic intercepted Sept. 10 was a warning of the next day's attacks at the World Trade Center and Pentagon ( news - web sites), an intelligence source said Wednesday. The conversation intercepted by the National Security Agency suggested that a big event was to take place the next day. It was not translated until Sept. 12. The conversation has been brought to the attention of the House and Senate intelligence committees who are conducting a joint inquiry into the Sept. 11 attacks. The panel is investigating the events surrounding...

ARIS, May 29 — Italian and German investigators have disclosed fresh information suggesting that hints of an attack involving aircraft and the United States were more widespread among European law enforcement agencies before Sept. 11 than previously suspected.The disclosures come after weeks in which the Bush administration and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which announced a shake-up today, have come under sharp criticism that they did not pay sufficient heed to signs of Al Qaeda plots in the United States that may have alerted them to the Sept. 11 attacks.A Central Intelligence Agency spokesman said today that before Sept....

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. intelligence analysts were alarmed over the mention of a "package" in several intercepted conversations because al Qaeda has used the term in the past as code for bomb material, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday. Messages from what the newspaper called "suspected terrorists" about delivering "packages" to American soil led officials to raise the country's terror-alert status last week, an official familiar with the new intelligence told the newspaper. After examining other intelligence that they declined to describe, U.S. officials concluded al Qaeda might be planning attacks with "dirty bombs" laced with radiological agents for...

U.S. Intercepts Al Qaeda-Bound Cell Phones Mon Sep 9, 8:01 PM ET HOUSTON (Reuters) - U.S. Customs agents at the Port of Houston found a large shipment of cell phones in January that were being sent out of the country to Osama bin Laden 's al Qaeda network, a customs official said on Monday. The port's U.S. Customs director, John Babb, said an estimated 1,000 phones were discovered in a cargo container during a routine check by a customs inspector using an X-ray machine. A Customs spokeswoman later said only 250 phones were found. "We did find here at the...