Threat Matrix: Daily Terror Threat - September 2006

[nwctwx]

Five Years Later, We're Still Not Safe
-Full Story-

In the five years since terrorists flew hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Americans have accepted inconvenience, sacrificed personal liberties and paid billions of dollars for a security clampdown that touches virtually every aspect of their lives.

And we're still not safe.

A close examination of the federal government's homeland security effort shows that there have been major accomplishments since the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. But it also reveals how vulnerable the nation remains to catastrophe.

	Hunt for bin Laden Is Chasing Shadows and Raising Tensions
	Homegrown Terror Suspects Raise Concern
	New Video Coming from al Zawahri and American al Qa'ida
	> Adam Yahiye Gadahn

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[Cindy]

"Good job, Mr. Spencer. You are right on target." -Cindy

HOTAIR.com - HOT AIR TV (Video - Blog): "SPENCER PWNS GADAHN" (September 13, 2006)

[Cindy]

http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/newsreleases/articles/060913WashDC.htm


September 13, 2006

"Leaders of Nationwide Illegal Alien Employee-Leasing Conspiracy Plead Guilty
Defendants brought in more than 550 illegal workers and laundered more than $20 million"

NEWS RELEASE SNIPPET: "WASHINGTON - Two leaders of a nationwide employee-leasing conspiracy that used hundreds of illegal aliens throughout the United States pleaded guilty before U.S. District Judge Kenneth Marra in the Southern District of Florida, and third defendant was sentenced, the Justice Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced today.

Jaroslaw Sawczuk, 39, a Polish citizen formerly of Coral Springs, Fla. and Jozef Bronislaw Bogacki, 43, a native of Poland and naturalized U.S. citizen residing in Clearwater, Fla. pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to transport, house and otherwise encourage illegal aliens to remain in the United States, and to commit visa, wire, mail, and tax fraud, and money laundering.

Judge Marra sentenced a third defendant, Pavel Preus, 39, a Polish citizen residing in Pompano Beach, Fla., who pleaded guilty to similar charges on September 13, 2005. Preus was sentenced to 37 months in prison, 36 months of supervised release, and ordered to pay $950,000 for unpaid payroll taxes.

Remaining defendants Lucia Kanis, 31, a Slovak citizen; Ivan Kanis, 39, a Slovak citizen residing in the Slovak Republic; and Andor Pikali, 37, a Slovak citizen who resided in Coral Springs, are federal fugitives, at large, and believed to be overseas.

Bogacki pleaded guilty to six counts, Sawczuk to three, of a 26-count indictment that alleges from 1995 to the present, the defendants conspired to provide unauthorized workers, mostly East Europeans who had entered the United States on tourist visas, to American companies with whom the defendants had contracted to provide legally authorized foreign workers.

The indictment alleges that more than 550 illegal aliens were brought into the United States by the defendants. According to the indictment, the alien workers obtained tourist visas to enter the United States and were employed illegally in the midwest and southeastern United States on farms, in dairies and in factories. The defendants contracted with American employers to provide workers, for whom the defendants were to pay payroll taxes and workers' compensation deductions. During the course of the conspiracy, the defendants failed to pay $6 million in payroll taxes and laundered in excess of $20 million.

The remaining defendants face maximum penalties of up to 20 years in prison and fines of up to $500,000. In addition, the government is seeking forfeiture of the defendants' assets. A forfeiture hearing is scheduled for Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2006 at 9 a.m. Bogacki and Sawczuk's sentencing is scheduled for Friday, Dec. 15, 2006."

[Cindy]

Note: The following text is a quote:
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http://www.ice.gov/pi/news/newsreleases/articles/060911sanjuan.htm


September 11, 2006

ICE agents seize more than 2 tons of cocaine in Puerto Rico
Greek-flagged vessel arrives at port of San Juan with more than 4,900 pounds of cocaine


SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico-U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced today the seizure of more than 4,900 pounds of cocaine on board the Greek-flagged vessel M/V Sierra Express at the port of San Juan. The seizure was part of Operation Caribbean Corridor, an investigative/law enforcement initiative by ICE, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), and United States Coast Guard (USCG) in the Caribbean Basin.

The M/V Sierra Express docked at the port of San Juan at approximately 1:00 p.m. on Sep. 10, 2006. The vessel's last port of call prior to arriving to San Juan was Puerto Cabello, Venezuela.

During a required inspection of the vessel, a K-9 unit of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) alerted on several boxes of printing paper inside one of the containers of the Sierra Express. The container was subsequently transported to the examination facilities of CBP where a thorough search revealed the presence of numerous kilo-size packages of a white powdery substance that when tested reacted positive for cocaine.

“Through the Caribbean Corridor Initiative, ICE, along with the FBI, DEA, and the USCG, have been able to intercept tons of narcotics and illegal merchandise destined to United States,” said Lydia St. John-Mellado, special agent in charge of ICE investigations in San Juan. “Our CBP partners have the technology, resources and intelligence to detect any type of contraband coming to the United States from abroad and will continue working with ICE and other Caribbean Corridor Initiative agencies to prevent these massive quantities of drugs from reaching the streets of Puerto Rico.”

No arrests were made during this seizure; however, ICE as well as other Operation Caribbean Corridor participating agencies continue with the investigation.

Puerto Rico Police Department and San Juan Municipal Police officer participated in this seizure.

-- ICE --

[Cindy]

ON THE NET...

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=hezbollah
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=hizballah
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/keyword?k=hizbullah

===
===

Note: See photos.


http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/malam_multimedia/English/eng_n/html/hezbollah_scouts_e.htm

Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center
at the Center for Special Studies (C.S.S)

September 11 , 2006


"Hezbollah’s Shi’ite youth movement, “The Imam al-Mahdi Scouts,” has tens of thousands of members. According to captured documents, they are indoctrinated with the principles of radical Iranian Islam. That indoctrination includes the personality cult of Iranian leader ‘Ali Khamenei and Hezbollah’s “battle legacy;” national Lebanese symbols are minimized."

[Cindy]

Note: The following post is a quote:
---

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1701203/posts


Amnesty report accuses Hizbullah of war crimes
The Guardian (UK) ^ | September 14, 2006 | Staff

Posted on 09/14/2006 2:53:50 AM PDT by John Carey

Hizbullah militants broke international humanitarian law during the recent conflict with Israel, an Amnesty International report concluded today. The report said Hizbullah had violated law by firing thousands of rockets into Israel and killing dozens of civilians during the fighting.

The human rights group called for a UN investigation into violations committed by both sides during the 34-day conflict, but the report published today focused on the actions of the Lebanese militant organisation.

Hizbullah launched nearly 4,000 rockets into northern Israel during July and August, killing at least 39 civilians. The firing of rockets into urban areas violated international law calling for distinction between civilian and military targets, Amnesty said.

(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...

[Cindy]

http://www.washingtontimes.com/national/20060914-123850-9564r.htm
"'These people want to kill us'"
By Guy Taylor
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES
September 14, 2006

[Cindy]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24401

"CBC’s 9/11 Slanders"
By Stephen Brown
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2006


ARTICLE SNIPPET: "It was the Canadian Left at its absolute insensitive and appalling worst.
On the eve of the 9/11 remembrance ceremonies, the leftist, anti-Bush Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national public broadcaster, aired an outrageous and disgraceful documentary on a Sunday news program regarding half-baked 9/11 conspiracy theories that only served to insult the memories of those who perished that tragic day.

Titled 9/11: Truth, Lies and Conspiracy, the only fascinating thing about the CBC show was its complete absurdity and the fact that it actually made it to air.

On the conspiracy side, it featured a young, budding “film-maker” whose online documentary portrays the destruction of the World Trade Center towers as the result of a bomb in the basement, demolition explosives planted beforehand throughout the buildings, and the airliner crash, which, it claims, was not enough in itself to topple the towers. According to this masterpiece of misleading fiction, the Pentagon was also hit by a missile, not by an airplane; and the passengers of United 93 didn’t crash into a Pennsylvania field, but disembarked at an airport.

This is a widely downloaded internet conspiracy film that is being translated into different languages. The CBC swallowed it whole."

[Cindy]

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=24400
"9/11, Five Years Later: A View from Europe"
By Bruce Bawer
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 14, 2006

[Cindy]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1701212/posts

http://www.zaman.com/?bl=columnists&alt=&trh=20060914&hn=36501
KERIM BALCI
09.14.2006 Thursday - ISTANBUL 13:49

"Zulfikar Coup"


ARTICLE SNIPPET: "The Shiite axis has now extended westward over Iraq and Lebanon. It’s no longer a situation whereby Iran used to extend revolution to the Islamic world; Iran is now extending itself."

[Godzilla]

bookmark

[nwctwx]

Iraqi Official Testifies to Links Between Saddam and Al Qaeda

A deputy prime minister of Iraq yesterday offered a sharp contradiction of the conventional wisdom here that Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Al Qaeda had no connection before the 2003 war, flatly contradicting a recent report from the Senate's intelligence committee.

In a speech in which he challenged the belief of war critics that Iraqis' lives are now worse than under Saddam Hussein, Barham Salih said, "The alliance between the Baathists and jihadists which sustains Al Qaeda in Iraq is not new, contrary to what you may have been told." He went on to say, "I know this at first hand. Some of my friends were murdered by jihadists, by Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives who had been sheltered and assisted by Saddam's regime."

A Kurdish politician who took his high school exams from inside a Baathist prison, Mr. Salih said he was the target of the alliance between jihadists, Baathists, and Al Qaeda in 2001, when a group known as Ansar al-Islam tried to assassinate him. In 2002, envoys of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two Kurdish parties sharing sovereignty over northern Iraq between the two Iraq wars, presented the CIA with evidence that the organization that tried to kill Mr. Salih had been in part funded and directed by Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard.

Those words directly contradict a recent report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that declassified a 2005 CIA assessment of Iraq's pre-war ties to Al Qaeda and found that none existed. In an interview after the speech yesterday, Mr. Salih said he was unaware of the CIA assessment. But he added, "There were links between Ansar al-Islam and Al Qaeda. The information at time [in 2002] was quite different. Now, we could not prove this in a court of law, but this is intelligence."

The Senate's report declassifies a July 2002 Defense Intelligence Agency study of Ansar al-Islam as a possible link between Saddam's Iraq and Al Qaeda that concludes that, even if it can be proven, as Mr. Salih at the time alleged, that the Baathist regime supported the group, "it will not necessarily implicate the regime in supporting Al Qaeda." The DIA concludes that Ansar al-Islam "receives assistance" from Al Qaeda but is not a branch of the terrorist organization.

Democrats in the last three days have used the Senate report as a stick with which to beat the White House. On Tuesday, the ranking Democrat on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Rep. Jane Harman of California, wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging him to rescind his remarks on NBC's "Meet the Press" last Sunday when he said he did not know whether an accused September 11 hijacker, Mohammed Atta, met with a senior Iraqi intelligence official in Prague. On that program, Mr. Cheney dismissed the Senate committee's report and said he had not read it.

On Tuesday and yesterday, the Senate Democratic leader's communications office sent out press releases accusing White House press secretary Tony Snow of misleading the public on Iraq when he insisted the president asserted that no a relationship between Al Qaeda and Iraq existed before the war. The Senate committee's report quotes the 2005 CIA report as saying Saddam Hussein did not know that the former commander of Al Qaeda in Iraq, Abu Musab Zarqawi, was in his country before the war.

Clinging to the assessments of the intelligence agencies, the Democrats have used the finding to make the broader point that the Iraq war is in no way related to the war on terrorism. Rep. Ike Skelton, a senior Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee from Missouri, yesterday issued a statement saying, "Our country is engaged in two separate wars. The first is the war against terrorism, which has its genesis in Afghanistan."

He went on to say, "The second war, in Iraq, originated because of the alleged threat of weapons of mass destruction against America and our interests. This was a war of choice." The two war theme was repeated by President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, in a speech on new directions for American foreign policy.

But Mr. Salih at the Brookings Institution yesterday rebutted this point. "The terrorism that we are facing is therefore not an aberration caused by the liberation of Iraq. It is not an expression of a legitimate grievance. It is the failure of the political culture that is the rotted offspring of the old order, the results of decades of inequality, intolerance, injustice, and officially-sponsored fanaticism," he said. A few breaths later, Mr. Salih said, "We are your allies in the global war against Al Qaeda."

Mr. Salih, who was in Iran last week on official business for Iraq, also said that he had "candid" conversations with Iranian officials and had raised the issue of improvised explosive devices from Iran getting into the hands of Iraqi insurgents.

[penguino]

New Al Qaeda message threatens France

Paris - Al-Qaeda's second in command, Ayman al-Zawahiri, has threatened France with attacks by an Algerian terrorist group, French media reported Thursday.

According to a transcription of a video released earlier this week, al-Zawahiri announced the official alliance between al Qaeda and the Algerian Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat (GSPC), and threatened that it would be a 'thorn' in the throat of the French.

'Our soldier sheikh..., Osama bin Laden, has charged me to announce that the GSPC has joined al-Qaeda. We pray to God that they become a thorn in the throats of the American and French crusaders and their allies,' al-Zawihiri said in the video, which was primarily concerned with the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The substance of the video statement was made public on Monday.

Al-Qaeda messages directly targetting France are rare. The last one dates back to 2004, when bin Laden criticized the French for banning the wearing of the Islamic headscarf in public schools.

The GSPC was created at the end of the 1990s by dissidents of the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA), and in September 2005 declared France to be 'public enemy number one, enemy of our religion, enemy of our community.'

http://news.monstersandcritics.com/europe/article_1201373.php/New_al-Qaeda_message_threatens_France

[penguino]

Europe is pregnant with Islam and will give birth to an Islamic Nation. (Saidi Kurdi 1908)

[penguino]

More sites:

http://www.wa3ad.org/index.php
http://www.bintjbeil.org/vb/
http://www.m-alhuda.com/
http://www.aljafr.net/vb/
http://www.yahosein.com/vb/
http://www.noor-alhuda.net/vb/
http://www.matamzabar.net/vb/
http://albahaa.phpnet.us/forum/index.php
http://www.14sr.com/vb/
http://www.eskanaali.com/forum/
http://www.al-jinan.org /

http://www.zolfaghar.com
http://ourpresident.ir/
http://president.ir/
 

[nwctwx]

ping

[freeperfromnj]

Possible Airline Bomb-Plot Material Found in the U.K.

Thursday, September 14, 2006

LONDON — British police are investigating several suspicious "items" discovered close to a highway that could be related to the plot to blow up airliners, Sky News reported Thursday....

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,213828,00.html

[freeperfromnj]

Police Find 'Terror Items'

Updated: 17:42, Thursday September 14, 2006

Explosives officers are investigating several suspicious "items" discovered close to the M40 motorway.

Scotland Yard has so far refused to discuss what the items are or whether they are linked to any on-going operation by its Anti-Terrorist Branch.

But they are not thought to be explosives.

Sky News has been told that several "bags" have been found and that they could be connected to the alleged plot to blow up airliners......
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30100-1234019,00.html?f=rss

[penguino]

Still photos from Zawahiri's latest tape with English subtitles:

http://www.minbar-sos.com/forum/showthread.php?t=872

[Mossad1967]

Ayman al Zawahiri makes very specific references and attacks President George Bush for not accepting the “truce offered by Osama bin Laden.” He urges all Muslims to take up jihad, to make use of every opportunity to take revenge on America for its imprisonment of Sheikh Umar Abd al-Rahman,” a reference to Abd al-Rahman who is imprisoned for his role in the February 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

"The days are pregnant and will bear new events God Willing"

1) Warnings and more warnings
2) A Truce offer
3) An invitation to convert to Islam
4) Indication that the truce and invitation to convert was not accepted. They now believe that they are justified in launching another 9/11 or worse.


Stat safe and vigilant!!!

Steve

[Cindy]

Thank you very much nw for pointing to this article.

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jveritas, gucho, jet jaguar: Ping.