Agents meet with Muslim community
http://www.sptimes.com/2004/10/06/Tampabay/Agents_meet_with_Musl.shtml
TAMPA - Federal agents held a town hall meeting Tuesday with members of Tampa Bay's Arab and Muslim community, giving them warning about an expected increase in interviews and investigations in coming weeks to thwart any possible terrorist attack near the elections.
FBI officials have organized similar meetings throughout the country, trying to spread the word that they need help uncovering plots. "We cannot do this alone," said Carl Whitehead, special agent in charge of the Tampa division, which oversees 18 counties in Central Florida.
The initiative, called the Fall Threat Task Force, is an attempt to gather information from members of the community who might have witnessed or heard about suspicious activity, Whitehead said during the meeting.
The meeting was held Tuesday night at the Embassy Suites at the University of South Florida. About 20 community members from Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Sarasota counties attended, as did about a dozen FBI agents.
Whitehead said he wanted to assure area residents that Muslims and Arabs were not being targeted, adding that agents will question storage business owners of any background, for example, if they think chemicals or bombs are being stashed at their site. Interviews will "not be based on religious or ethnic background," he said.
What will they be based on? community members asked.
Whitehead said agents will make that decision based on whether their sources lead them to believe that a resident has "useful" information to give them.
Community members asked for more specifics.
"What type of help are you seeking from our community?" asked Ahmed Bedier, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
"We're just as committed to making sure our country and our state are safe," he said.
One way of helping would be to alleviate fears among community members that the FBI is not conducting an immigration roundup, Whitehead said. Also, ask people to step forward if they know something. And they should report hate crimes, which Whitehead said his office would vigorously investigate.
Community members asked about charities, to which many of them donate. How do they know they won't be under investigation if the charity later is found to be contributing to terrorism groups?
FBI officials said they should make sure that the charity is not listed on the State Department's list of terrorism organizations. They still could be questioned, however, if the charity is later found to be giving funds to terrorists, just so agents can be sure they didn't know where the money was going.
Other members said they wanted more answers about how they could learn to trust the government based on policies and comments by members of the Bush administration they found racist and offensive.
"There's a big mistrust in the Muslim community," said Haitham Barazanji, of St. Petersburg with the Islamic Society of Pinellas County.
"We're trying to help, that's why we're here today," Whitehead said.
After the meeting, Bedier said he thought the town hall gathering was a step in the right direction. But it's not enough.
"We want real dialogue," he said. "Not just damage control."
Pakistan feared as source of nuclear terror
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=story_7-10-2004_pg7_6
Washington: Pakistan and Russia have been called “nations of greatest concern” as potential sources of nuclear weapon or fissile material leaks to terrorists.
A new report by the Congressional Research Service (CRS) on nuclear terrorism said, “The fear regarding Pakistan is that some members of the armed forces might covertly give a weapon to terrorists or that, if President Musharraf were overthrown, an Islamic fundamentalist government or a state of chaos in Pakistan might enable terrorists to obtain a weapon.” While, the report concedes, it would be difficult for terrorists to mount a nuclear attack on a US city, such an attack is plausible and would have catastrophic consequences, in one scenario killing over a half-million people and causing damage of over $1 trillion. “Terrorists or rogue states might acquire a nuclear weapon in several ways. The nations of greatest concern as potential sources of weapons or fissile materials are widely thought to be Russia and Pakistan.”
Russia, the report notes, has many tactical nuclear weapons, which tend to be lower in yield but more dispersed and apparently less secure than strategic weapons. It also has much highly enriched uranium (HEU) and weapons grade plutonium, some said to have inadequate security. Many experts believe that technically sophisticated terrorists could, without state support, fabricate a nuclear bomb from HEU. However, opinion is divided on whether terrorists could make a bomb using plutonium.
CRS warns that terrorists might also obtain HEU from the more than 130 research reactors worldwide. “If terrorists acquired a nuclear weapon, they could use many means in an attempt to bring it into the United States. This nation has many thousands of miles of land and sea borders, as well as several hundred ports of entry. Terrorists might smuggle a weapon across lightly-guarded stretches of borders, ship it in using a cargo container, place it in a hold of a crude oil tanker, or bring it in using a truck, a boat, or a small airplane,” argues the analysis.
The report describes the architecture of the US response as “layered defence.” The goal is to try to block terrorists at various stages in their attempts to obtain a nuclear weapon and smuggle it into the US. The underlying concept is that the probability of success is higher if many layers are used rather than just one or two. Layers include threat reduction programmes in the former USSR, efforts to secure HEU worldwide, control of former Soviet and other borders, the Container Security Initiative and Proliferation Security Initiative, and US border security.