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Posted on 11/17/2004 9:24:29 PM PST by nwctwx
Hiding In Plain Sight
"Why Pakistan still isn't aggressively pursuing the ex — Taliban leaders living inside the country"
...excerpt...
Mullah Mujahed, a veteran Taliban commander who has taken four bullets in his career as an Islamic warrior, is in a surprisingly good mood for a guy sharing a Kabul jail cell with a hungry rat. A burly figure with black locks and a black beard, Mujahed prays in a corner, oblivious to the progress of the rat as it tunnels under a gray blanket toward a bag of dates. Rising from prayer, the devout Taliban says through the bars of the cell, "When I was on jihad, the holy Prophet Muhammad talked to me in my dreams."
Mujahed's Afghan and American interrogators are interested in other voices he heard during his time fighting U.S. forces, especially those voices that came from Pakistan. Mujahed was captured four months ago in the mountains of Afghanistan's Uruzgan province after an epic chase involving eight helicopters and dozens of troops. Afterward, Afghan intelligence found stored in his satellite telephone the numbers of several top Taliban military commanders, all hiding in Pakistan. His warden says Mujahed was caught with 60 remote-controlled bombs that he allegedly confessed to picking up in Pakistan after attending a Taliban war council in the southern city of Quetta.
In the Afghan theater of the war on terrorism, Pakistan — despite its close alliance with George W. Bush's Administration — is playing something of a double game. On the one hand, Islamabad has aggressively pursued al-Qaeda operatives since 9/11. It has arrested more than 600 suspects and handed most of them over to the U.S. Also, Pakistan has sent thousands of troops into the tribal areas to drive out al-Qaeda fighters hiding in the mountains along its Afghan border.
But President Pervez Musharraf's government has done little to capture the many Taliban commanders who have fled into hiding in the country, according to Afghan officials and Taliban fighters and sympathizers in the frontier Pakistani cities of Quetta and Peshawar. Those exiles include Mohammed Omar, the one-eyed mullah who formerly led the Taliban. Pakistan's reluctance, according to a senior Kabul official, stems from its "nostalgia" for when Afghanistan was firmly within its orbit of influence. Letting the Taliban remain free gives Pakistan a card to play if or when the U.S. decides to vacate Afghanistan. "If money and support were to stop from the Pakistani side, the Taliban would be finished," says Mullah "Rocketi," a former Taliban commander who earned his nickname for his accuracy in shooting Soviet tanks and who spent time at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Link to 'Hiding in Plain Sight'
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101041129-785360,00.html
New mobile phone link to cancer
Norwegians to charge parishioners for certain services to keep poor churches afloat
Britain plans tough new anti-terrorism laws
Al Jazeera correspondent remanded in Spain for Al Qaeda links
10 Al Qaeda suspects jailed in Spain who helped prepare 9/11 attacks
Where Goss Sees Trouble
"The CIA's new director sees his job as making sure the agency gets smarter and faster after a string of embarrassing intelligence failures. But is Porter Goss a reformer, or does he just want to enforce loyalty in the ranks?"
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101041129-785385,00.html
FAILING TO CONNECT THE DOTS Before al-Qaeda's attacks, the agency was still risk averse, a result of investigations into power abuses in the '70s. Key intelligence — including proof that al-Qaeda suspects were entering the U.S.--wasn't shared with other agencies until it was too late, and field officers were more likely to be stationed in embassies than inside enemy territory. Congress is debating reforms, and Goss wants to encourage more risk taking
CONNECTING TOO MANY DOTS Former Director George Tenet reportedly told President Bush the agency had a "slam dunk" case that Iraq was developing WMD. But as analysts prepared the National Intelligence Estimate of Iraq's capabilities, important caveats were cut. The agency had almost no operatives in Iraq after 1998, so it had to rely on information from foreign intelligence services, defectors and exile groups. Much of it was ambiguous and, in some cases, just plain wrong
UNAUTHORIZED LEAKS Two months before the election, unnamed CIA, Pentagon and State Department professionals began grumbling to reporters that Iraq was in much worse shape than Bush was claiming on the stump. After the leak of a July National Intelligence Estimate predicting Iraq could be in civil war by the end of 2005, conservative columnist Robert Novak accused the CIA of trying to undermine the President's re-election
FREELANCING The former top analyst in the CIA's bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, published an anonymous book last summer — cleared by the agency — accusing the Administration of botching the war on terrorism. A 22-year CIA veteran, Scheuer repeated his charges in frequent media appearances, even after superiors ordered him to stop. Critics say he should never have been given approval to write the book in the first place. Scheuer resigned from the agency two weeks ago
A lot of *dots* were connected in that translation.
A look at the top insurgents in Fallujah
http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/tallahassee/news/world/10240754.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq - (KRT) - Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian-born suspected terror mastermind with a $25 million bounty on his head whose group has claimed dozens of beheadings, bombings and kidnappings, is perhaps the best known leader of Iraq's insurgent groups. Some other key leaders:
_Sheik Abdullah al-Janabi, the Emir of Fallujah. A firebrand cleric, he headed the Mujahedeen Shura, the insurgent council that controlled Fallujah for six months. His fate is unknown, but The Washington Post published an interview with him reportedly conducted in Fallujah on Nov. 15.
_Sheik Zafir al-Ubaidi. A prominent Fallujah cleric, he provided religious guidance to the insurgents' council and issued religious edicts that were enforced with public floggings and, some Fallujah residents said, executions without trial. Rebel sources say al-Ubaidi survived the Fallujah offensive.
_Moayed Ahmed Yasseen, also known as Abu Ahmed. Suspected leader of Mohammed's Army, a group for former intelligence agents, army, security officials and high-ranking members of Saddam Hussein's regime, Yasseen has been arrested by the Iraqi government, according to a Nov. 14 announcement.
_Abu Abdullah Hassan bin Mahmud. The leader of Ansar al Sunnah, a deadly group said to include Kurdish Ansar al Islam operatives, foreign Islamic radicals and militant Iraqi Sunnis and allied with al-Zarqawi, Mahmud's whereabouts are unknown. His group has executed several hostages, including 12 Nepalese and 11 Iraqi national guardsmen, and claims about 40 suicide bombings.
News briefs from around California
http://www.montereyherald.com/mld/montereyherald/news/10240898.htm
Associated Press
LOS ANGELES - Campus police at California State University, Northridge, have been trained to respond to potential terrorist attacks.
The Northridge campus was the first in the public university system to enroll its officers in a federal Justice Department training course on dealing with chemical, biological and nuclear terrorist strikes. Police at nearly half the 23 CSU campuses have undergone anti-terrorism training.
"Universities are soft targets," said campus police Chief Anne Glavin, who heads the 26-officer force. "We're open 24-7, we have stadiums and everything's open for easy student access."
The CSU training initiative began last fall.
To bolster the program, the Northridge campus secured $75,000 in federal grants for hazardous-materials gear and other equipment for its officers. Campus officials also have a $165,000 emergency mobile command unit.
The University of California, meanwhile, has its own security plan. Several University of California, Los Angeles, police officers and administrators also have received federal training to respond to attacks.
Did you see the interview today? I did not hear some of the words being attributed to person. Much of what he said was reasonable. It is not clear why everybody is jumping on him.
Unthinkable?
"An attack on an American city by terrorists armed with a small nuclear device is an even bet within a decade, some experts say"
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/11/21/BURRESS.TMP
Imagine a relatively small nuclear bomb of 10 kilotons exploding in San Francisco's Union Square. "Everything to the Museum of Modern Art would vaporize," writes Harvard security analyst Graham Allison in his chilling new book, "Nuclear Terrorism."
"Everything from the Transamerica building to Nob Hill would be sites of massive destruction; everything within the perimeter of Coit Tower and the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge would go up in flames."
No survivors would be found amid nearly 100 square blocks, and buildings in about 400 square blocks would be totally destroyed or left looking like the Oklahoma City federal building after it was crushed by a truck bomb.
To alert Americans to the intimate extent of the peril, Allison's book is linked to an Internet "Blast Map" showing the radius of destruction for such a nuclear device anywhere in the United States. It can be viewed by ZIP code at http://www.nuclearterror.org.
Allison and other experts agree that the most likely form of nuclear terrorism is a "dirty bomb," where radioactive material is scattered by a conventional explosive or perhaps an attack on a nuclear reactor.
But some analysts are worried more by the less likely but far more catastrophic detonation of a terrorist nuclear bomb.
"The gravest danger, however, and the one requiring the most urgent attention, is the possibility that terrorists could obtain highly enriched uranium or plutonium for use in an improvised nuclear device," according to Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and former Sen. Sam Nunn, now head of the nonprofit Nuclear Threat Initiative.
Their warning comes in the opening pages of another sobering new book, "The Four Faces of Nuclear Terrorism," from the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Monterey, the nation's largest nongovernmental organization focusing exclusively on nonproliferation issues. Based on a two-year study, the book says terrorist organizations are now able to build crude nuclear bombs.
This new nuclear nightmare was summoned up in the presidential campaign last month, when Vice President Dick Cheney warned in a widely reported speech:
"The biggest threat we face now as a nation is the possibility of terrorists ending up in the middle of one of our cities with deadlier weapons than have ever before been used against us -- biological agents or a nuclear weapon or a chemical weapon of some kind, to be able to threaten the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans."
The Boston Herald's story about Cheney's speech carried the headline, "Vote Kerry, get nuked, veep warns." Critics accused Cheney of election scaremongering, but analysts on both sides of the partisan divide share his assessment of the terrorist nuclear threat, even if they disagree with him about Kerry.
"Fissile material is widely available," said UC Berkeley Professor Harold Smith, a nonproliferation expert who served in the Clinton White House. "The technology is widely known. The prudent man would assume that this kind of tragedy is going to happen and should be asking himself, 'What can I do about it?' "
Fueling the alarm was an ABC News demonstration last year of how easy it would be to penetrate post-Sept. 11 security. A news team successfully sent uranium inside a shipping container from Jakarta through the Port of Los Angeles.
The shipment underscored findings of a report from the Peace Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany, that terrorist transport of nuclear weapons by sea or by land "probably would not be detected."
The U.S. government has several approaches to reducing the danger, but critics question their adequacy. The strategies range from new radiation detectors at U.S. ports to Department of Homeland Security advice to "learn how to build a temporary fallout shelter ... even if you do not live near a potential nuclear target."
In August, San Francisco became the first port on the West Coast to receive the radiation detectors, with Oakland scheduled to be added by the end of this year.
If sufficient funding is provided, the Department of Homeland Security hopes to have the machines at all of the United States' more than 300 ports of entry -- including sea, land and air -- by the end of 2005, said Customs and Border Patrol spokesman Barry Morrissey.
Asked if the monitor would have detected the ABC News uranium shipment, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Michael Milne said, "It's designed to, yes. They should identify most sources of radiation."
UC's Smith was skeptical. "I doubt it will be very effective," he said, adding that radiation from highly enriched uranium and plutonium "is difficult to detect and easily shielded." Also, he added, the system wouldn't prevent offshore detonations inside a port harbor.
Allison welcomes the screening, but he too believes the current technology can be circumvented. "The opportunities for shielding overwhelm the current capability for finding," he said.
Allison urges that top priority be given to denying terrorists access to nuclear materials and weapons in the first place, with such steps as securing existing stockpiles and weapons, blocking production of new fissile materials, stopping more nations from acquiring nuclear arms and eliminating the nuclear black market.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., introduced legislation in April directing the president to establish a task force on removing nuclear materials from vulnerable sites around the world, but opposition turned the measure into a "sense of Congress" recommendation in this year's defense authorization bill.
Everyone agrees on one thing: A nuclear blast in a U.S. city would eclipse Sept. 11 in its horror.
"With a 10-ton nuclear weapon stolen from the former Soviet arsenal and delivered to an American city in a cargo container, al Qaeda could make 9/11 a footnote," said Allison, founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and a former assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans.
"And if not al Qaeda, one of its affiliates can step up, using a weapon built of (highly enriched uranium) from Pakistan or North Korea or from a research reactor in Uzbekistan," Allison wrote.
Such a bomb at noon in New York's Times Square would kill a million people in the blast itself and in collapsing buildings, fires and fallout in the following hours, he said.
"A nuclear terrorist attack is more likely than not within the next decade," he told The Chronicle. To dramatize the point, he's accepting bets, at 51-to-49 odds, on such an event.
Alarm over the prospect of a city being devastated by a terrorist nuclear bomb was sounded soon after Sept. 11, but has grown noticeably louder in recent weeks and months.
"An American Hiroshima" was the ominous title of a recent New York Times column by Nicholas Kristof. It quoted former Secretary of Defense William Perry saying there is an even chance of a nuclear terror strike in the United States in the next six years.
"We're racing toward unprecedented catastrophe," said Perry, a Stanford professor and co-director of the Stanford-Harvard Preventive Defense Project. "This is preventable, but we're not doing the things that could prevent it."
The most dangerous source of a "loose nuke" or the materials to make one, many security analysts say, are the former states of the Soviet Union, where much of the nuclear materials and weapons left over from the Cold War remain scattered and inadequately guarded.
To confront the danger, Lugar and Nunn started the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, by which the U.S. government assists former Soviet states in securing nuclear materials and weapons, a program Smith implemented when he served in the White House.
That program and similar efforts, however, receive only about $1 billion a year, just a third of the amount recommended by a bipartisan presidential commission in 2001.
"Roughly two-thirds of Russia's fissile material is inadequately secured," Carl Robichaud of the Century Foundation said a critical report in August, "What the 9/11 Commission Forgot."
At the same time, fears have been fueled by mounting evidence of terrorist groups making repeated attempts to obtain nuclear materials and weapons at the same time as potential sources multiply.
Added to the stockpiles in the former Soviet Union are the contraband exports of nuclear secrets and materials from Pakistan, Iran's uranium enrichment plans and North Korean nuclear weapons development.
At Berkeley, Smith has a somber plan, not for prevention but for the harrowing days and months after such a catastrophe. He and Professor Steven Weber, director of the Institute of International Relations at UC Berkeley, propose to study what would happen if a nuclear bomb blew up in a major city somewhere in the world.
Their proposed study, for which they seek funding, would use Moscow as the hypothetical target, given the frequent terrorist strikes in Russia.
Unlike disaster-response plans already developed by the United States and other governments for a nuclear terrorist strike, the two UC researchers want to look beyond emergency response, evacuation and radiation containment.
They ask: What precautionary plans could help avert retaliation against the wrong target, mass panic, a collapse of world trade brought on by sudden closure of ports?
If Moscow were destroyed by an anonymous bomb, what could reduce the risk of Russian retaliation mistakenly launched against Chechnya or the United States?
One of their ideas is to have a team of international technical experts prepared for immediate dispatch to assess the bomb's origin by analyzing its distinctive radioactive signature, Smith and Weber said.
"A week's delay in retaliation could literally save the world," said Smith.
It's a topic so chilling that few people want to face it, Smith said. "I'm finding what I call the psychology of denial."
Yet, given al Qaeda's many efforts to acquire nuclear materials, its desire to inflict extensive casualties and the unrelenting stepping up of the scale of its attacks, the prospects of what-if must be faced, Smith and Weber said.
"I'm a great believer in having these thinking-the-unthinkable discussions up front," Weber said. "It would be irresponsible not to plan for it."
site from story:
http://www.nuclearterror.org./
*blast maps for any zipcode*
Agent says terrorists will hit again (Duh?!)
http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1121williams21.html
..excerpt...
The Phoenix FBI agent who warned that Osama bin Laden was using flight schools to train terrorists two months before the Sept. 11 attacks said Saturday that "they are going to try and hit us again."
In his first interview since his now famous memo was written, Ken Williams told The Arizona Republic that Americans must reclaim the sense of unity and purpose that gripped the nation three years ago to thwart the next terrorist attack.
"We are in a war with people who really want to hurt us," he said Saturday. "In my opinion, it is not over."
Williams, who eschews being called a whistle-blower, talked about the years following his memo, the personal toll of watching the World Trade Center collapse and the Federal Bureau of Investigation's effort to combat terrorism.
"I don't consider myself a whistle-blower. I take exception to that word," he said. "If you look at the world prior to 9/11, we were prevented from doing certain things. We were victimized by our own restraints."
The interview came after members of the Military Order of World Wars presented him with the group's national Law and Order Award during a luncheon in Tempe.
FBI agent says intelligence not acted on
13:41 AEDT Mon Nov 22 2004
http://news.ninemsn.com.au/article.aspx?id=23231
AP - The FBI agent who wrote a memo warning that terrorists were training at flight schools before the September 11 attacks said concerns over racial profiling may have prevented officials from acting on his intelligence.
"If you look at the world prior to 9/11, we were prevented from doing certain things. We were victimised by our own restraints," Ken Williams told The Arizona Republic in his first interview since writing his now-famous memo in July 2001.
Very nice. Thanks for sharing.
thanks for the note. initally, i figured scheuer quit and was mad at his intermediate bosses, the ones that are in the process of being rooted out by bush. given that, i figured scheuer was probably a misguided, but honest, man.
the more i hear about this guy, the bigger a jerk he seems to be. on the one hand he wanted to get ubl, but later he works against the president. i think scheuer is having some anxiety difficulties, and has a strong need to be "seen". i would not trust scheuer if my life depended on it.
his actions should be investigated for charges.
Hope you don't mind, I've forwarded a copy of your Thanksgiving link to someone who will love it - it is very nicely done Cindy!
Forward away!
GSS: 33 attacks thwarted recently
By MARGOT DUDKEVITCH
Nov. 21, 2004 18:23 | Updated Nov. 21, 2004 22:42
Since the beginning of September the Shin Bet and security forces have thwarted 33 terror attacks that were on the verge of penetration into Israel, a Shin Bet report released on Sunday revealed.
So far this month, seven attacks were thwarted. Fifteen attacks were frustrated in October, of which twelve were planned by terrorists in the Gaza Strip, and another ten were prevented in September. The report also cited that the existence of the security fence has forced terror groups to recruit Palestinians who work inside Israel illegally to launch suicide attacks on their behalf because of their familiarity with areas inside Israel.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1101010792486
G20 ministers call for cooperation on combating terrorist financing
www.chinaview.cn 2004-11-22 04:28:02
BERLIN, Nov. 21 (Xinhuanet) - G20 finance ministers and central bankers on Sunday called for continued attention on combating money laundering and terrorist financing.
"International cooperation should be enhanced in order to protect and stabilize financial systems worldwide," the group of 20(G20) ministers said in a statement issued at the end of its two-day meeting here.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2004-11/22/content_2244351.htm
Black box missing as investigators look into cause of China plane crash
11-22-2004, 05h10
- (AFP)
BEIJING (AFP) - Investigators in China are searching for clues as to the cause of a plane crash that killed 54 people, but after more than 24 hours of efforts they have still not located the crucial black box.
China woke up to its worst aviation disaster in more than two years Sunday, when a regional jet plowed into a lake shortly after take-off from Baotou in northern Inner Mongolia region, apparently after a mid-air explosion.
http://www.turkishpress.com/int/news.asp?id=041122051018.2d20iyxr.xml
This is laughable! After the oil for food program. PLEASE this is aweful white of them LOL
Russia backs Paris Club pact to write off Iraqi debt
Late negotiations seal deal to help ease burden on incoming government
Accord will wipe out up to 80 percent of money owed to western creditors
Compiled by Daily Star staff
Monday, November 22, 2004
Russia agreed on Sunday to join a pact to forgive up to 80 percent, or about $33 billion worth, of Iraq's debts, a U.S. Treasury official said on Sunday at a Group of 20 meeting where the multinational agreement was engineered.
http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=3&article_id=10307
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