Threat Matrix- Daily Terror Thread (4):

Doh!

I thought I corrected that typo before the post went live. Obviously it did work.

Care = Car

Good for you, I am glad that you have been working on this.

No, I can't see it with this machine, but have no doubt that you have done an excellent job on it.

KDWN radio, last year was giving away free pocket sized Constitution and Bill of Rights, folks called every day, for their copies.

Fanatic: 'Kill Tony Blair'

A BRITISH-based crony of Osama Bin Laden yesterday urged followers to assassinate Tony Blair.

Mohammed al-Massari said it would be justified because of the Iraq war.

He told BBC Radio Five Live: “He is Tony Blair — the commander of the army. All British targets are a legitimate target.”

Al-Massari has bragged in the past about terrorist Bin Laden ringing to thank him for his help.

A Scotland Yard spokesman said: “If we receive a complaint over what was said then it will be considered.”

http://www.thesun.co.uk/article/0,,2-2004110140,00.html

BILL Clinton cannot be Kerry's Vice-President, because legally BILL Clinton has served as many Presidential terms as legally possible; therefore he legally cannot be President should Kerry die or become disabled. Now HILLARY Clinton can legally be Kerry's VP. Since Kerry is clueless as to what being pro-America is all about; it would not surprise me at all if Kerry picks HILLARY Clinton as his VP.

We do grow and change.

Here is your next assignment, (laughing out loud).

It comes from one of the threads on FReeper of course, it is the link for john kerry's website, the forum with the instructions on how to handle calls to talk shows.

Not earth shaking, but great fun if the Talk Show Hosts have it to read on air.

http://forum.johnkerry.com/index.php?showtopic=6044

And yes, there is hope still, yesterday, my 22 year old granddaughter phoned, seems she has a new real estate license and needed to know how to be an agent.

That I could handle, the big secret is go out and knock on doors. LOL

But when she said she loved Rush Limbaugh and was a conservative, I felt good.

She has always lived on the other side of the country and I haven't seen her since she was 6 or so. But I am proud of her.

Thank you for trying, this link didn't work for me.

What a wonderful bunch of people you all are.

Thank you SP2BF - your work is very much appreciated and awaited.

So who is that ugly guy? Sheikh Muhammad Saleh???

So here we have the picture and the plot for the next Stephen King novel.

GOOGLE Search Term: "al-Massari"
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22al-Massari%22&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&filter=0

http://209.157.64.200/focus/f-news/1073660/posts

Islamic rappers' message of terror
Observer ^ | 02/08/04 | Antony Barnett

Posted on 02/07/2004 5:09:53 PM PST by Pikamax

"Islamic rappers' message of terror"

Antony Barnett Sunday February 8, 2004 The Observer

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "It's rap, jihad-style. A music video with blood-curdling images, fronted by a young British Muslim rapper brandishing a gun and a Koran is the latest hit in radical Islamic circles. The rap song is called 'Dirty Kuffar' - Arabic for dirty non-believer - and it praises Osama bin Laden and the attack on the World Trade Centre in New York.

The video has recently been posted on the British website run by the Islamic extremist Mohammed al-Massari, the UK-based Saudi Arabian dissident who has lived in Britain since 1994. Al-Massari claims that the video has been selling in large quantities at mosques to the younger generation and is in heavy demand overseas.

The rapper fronting the video calls himself Sheikh Terra and the Soul Salah Crew - a take on the rap group So Solid Crew. 'Salah' is Arabic for faith.

The video might at first be mistaken for an Ali G spoof, but the violent images quickly reveal it is no joke."

I will freep mail you the html version in text. You will have the information; but it won't be formatted.

I will send as soon as I'm done posting the Russian news I've received.

By the 12th and 22nd Amendments, Clinton is ineligible to run for President again. It is unclear if he would be ineligible for Vice-President. The issue of Kerry's death could be excepted by virtue of Clinton's experience in running the office of President (whole lot of reading needed on this topic) according to the source I read. Anyway it didn't sound as if Clinton was interested in this scenario by the reports. Time will tell, however. These days anything is possible.

Source: Newsletter (sorry no URL)

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RUSSIANS' FEARS OF KREMLIN REEMERGE
Influence of Putin Is Discerned Behind Strong-Arm Tactics

By Peter Baker, Washington Post Foreign Service
The Washington Post, Washington, D.C.
Sunday, March 7, 2004; Page A16

MOSCOW -- If she hadn't stopped to fix her hair, she figures, she might be
dead. Yelena Tregubova had just told a taxi driver by phone that she would be right down. But, she recalled, she paused in front of the mirror before heading downstairs. A minute later, a small bomb exploded outside her apartment door, shaking both her building and her peace of mind.

While uninjured, Tregubova, the author of a best-selling book critical of President Vladimir Putin's Kremlin, took what she saw as an unsubtle hint and fled the country. "I just realized that until the election, I'm a walking target," she said by telephone from a country she declined to identify.

Little by little, in certain circles, fear is creeping back in Russia. Although ordinary Russians go about their lives without the sort of pervasive terror that characterized the Soviet Union, people in parts of Russian society are increasingly watching what they say and looking over
their shoulders. A week before Putin's almost certain reelection to a second term, scholars, journalists, reformist politicians, human rights activists
and even business moguls describe an atmosphere of anxiety that has left them wary of crossing the Kremlin.

"There's a broad spectrum of fear, and it's a new thing; it's just appeared during Putin's time," said Lev Ponomaryov, a Soviet-era dissident who now leads a human rights group and was arrested for leading an illegal protest
last month. "It would be wrong to say Soviet times have come back already, because I'm one of the fiercest critics and here I am in Moscow talking to you. But it's the tendency of these times coming back."

"People have a genetic memory of those years," added Konstantin Remchukov, a former member of parliament who is close to big-business leaders alarmed by the recent arrest of Russia's richest man, oil tycoon Mikhail Khodorkovsky. "They're scared to death," he said.

The return of fear, while limited to certain circles, has accompanied what critics at home and overseas call a regression in democracy under Putin. As the former KGB colonel has concentrated more power in his hands during his
four years in office, those who might challenge him have often found themselves exposed to trouble.

A former parliament speaker running against Putin in the March 14 election briefly disappeared last month, saying afterward that he was abducted and drugged. A Russian who took a foreign journalist into Chechnya to report on
the war without government supervision was taken away by authorities and has not been heard from in weeks. A former federal investigator looking into allegations of government involvement in a series of apartment bombings in 1999 was arrested just before he was to bring his suspicions to court.

The imprisonment of Khodorkovsky was only one in a series of prosecutions against executives of his Yukos oil company after the tycoon challenged Putin's monopoly on power. When the Persian Gulf state of Qatar arrested two Russian intelligence agents for murdering a Chechen separatist living there, Russian authorities jailed two Qatari wrestlers passing through the Moscow airport on their way to a training session.

Tregubova had earned the Kremlin's wrath with her book "Tales of a Kremlin Digger," which depicted a control-obsessed apparatus around Putin. She is now working on a second book.

The bomb that blew up outside her apartment had the force of a grenade. Police said it was meant for neighbors across the hall, but Tregubova said no one had lived in that apartment for five years.

"Maybe they were trying to demonstrate that they had their hand on my pulse and to terrify me," she said. "It was obvious they were trying to create some sort of atmosphere."

Whether or not the Kremlin had any direct involvement with these incidents, they have sent a message. "Everyone knows if you personally attack Putin and he gets mad, you're going to get it," said Pavel Felgenhauer, a military
analyst often critical of the president.

Putin has said he will continue moving Russia along the path to democracy, but he has also expressed a wistfulness for the Soviet Union. He recently dismissed his human rights ombudsman in Chechnya and appointed a former tax
police chief, Mikhail Fradkov, as prime minister. Fradkov's résumé -- which has a one-year gap just after he attended school, followed by a stint in the Soviet Embassy in New Delhi -- has stirred speculation that he, like Putin,
was a KGB agent.

The response among many in Russia, especially Chechens and other ethnic minorities who feel threatened at home, has been to leave. The number of Russians seeking asylum in industrialized countries jumped by two-thirds last year to 33,000, vaulting Russia past every other country in the world, according to the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

And other countries increasingly have been offering shelter to high-profile Russians fleeing prosecution. Britain last year gave asylum to tycoon Boris Berezovsky, a vocal Putin foe, as well as a partner of his and a senior
Chechen separatist leader. Three of Khodorkovsky's billionaire partners fled to Israel. And courts in Greece, Denmark and the United States lately have rebuffed extradition requests from Russia.

Some scholars increasingly shun contacts with foreign counterparts for fear they will be accused of spying, as several researchers have been during Putin's presidency. The owner of a movie theater in Moscow abruptly canceled
a Chechen film festival last year two nights before it was to open for fear of trouble. Many journalists say they try not to air criticism of Putin, particularly on national television, which has been controlled exclusively
by the Kremlin since it shut down the last independent network last year and gave the channel to a sports network.

A certain self-censorship has developed. After Khodorkovsky was arrested, his fellow business moguls offered no public protest for fear of being next. "Everybody understands they're vulnerable," said Remchukov, who has worked
for a major tycoon. "And feeling vulnerable they behave quietly."

"The situation has gotten worse," said Felgenhauer, who writes a newspaper column but is rarely invited by television producers to appear on air anymore. "The rule used to be that they knew they couldn't criticize Putin
and had to be cautious in what they said but they could report a fact as a fact. Now there are problems even with facts."

Neither of the two state-owned television networks even mentioned the failure of ballistic missile tests conducted last month right in front of Putin during a massive military exercise. A third network, NTV, which is
owned by a state-controlled energy company, reported the test failure and put Felgenhauer on to discuss it, but he said producers pleaded with him not to say anything to offend Putin.

Felgenhauer said he moderated his comments. "I saw they were so afraid so I decided I would not make big trouble," he said.

Sergei Ivanov, a Byzantine scholar, said he has noticed the changing tenor at his academic institute. Two years ago, a Swiss post-graduate student contacted him and asked to be accredited by the institute so he could do research in Russian archives and libraries, Ivanov said. A superior at the institute rejected the request. "He could be a spy," Ivanov recalled his superior saying.

"Then it looked much more outrageous than it does now," Ivanov said. "Now it looks normal." In fact, he added, when Federal Security Service (FSB) agents showed up at the institute a month ago demanding a list of scholars with
foreign contacts, everyone shuddered, even though the agents said they were merely helping research a Putin speech. "This is characteristic of today."

Even some everyday voters are more circumspect in what they say. Masha Volkenstein, a pollster who works for democratic reformers, said participants in her focus groups are more reserved now; after one such session recently, a voter fretted that the discussion had been videotaped.

"They behave in a different way than they did two or three years ago," Volkenstein said. "They understand things are changing, and they are more cautious than they were before."

Mikhail Delyagin, an economist and former adviser to fired prime minister Mikhail Kasyanov, wrote in a column in the Moscow Times last week that "many young Muscovites are planning to go to the polls on March 14 out of fear"
that not showing up could cost them job opportunities.

Mikhail Trepashkin, a lawyer and former FSB investigator, was stopped by police in his car in October and arrested for having a gun. He insists it was planted. Trepashkin was supposed to go to court that week to press his theory that the FSB had a role in a series of apartment bombings in 1999
that the government blamed on Chechens.

His wife, Tatyana, said she had begged him not to get involved. "He realized that it was dangerous," she recalled. "We talked about it many times, and I
told him again and again I didn't like it." She added, "I guess he actually dug so deeply that he discovered some truth." (END) (ARTUIS)

NOTE: If Russian scholars, journalists, reformist politicians, human rights activists and even business moguls are becoming wary of the Kremlin then Ukrainian scholars, journalists, reformist politicians, human rights
activists and even business moguls should also be wary, even more so.

Excellent reminder - whew - tinfoil anyone?

Thank you!

Ruth

I still have difficulty looking at these Canadian Falcon passports - The Canadians cannot contain or control terrorists in their own country, but they can issue passports to carrier birds. If I can't say anything nice.......

I am familiar with the basic wording of Clinton being ineligible to run for President.

But I'm unable to follow a lot of the legal run on.

Is there a loop hole that will let him run for VP? Was this not covered in legalize?

Canadian? That is a gif file of Falcon Passports issued by the UAE.

And the point of the passport requires the falcons to receive a nice combination of vaccines which are virii shedable.

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WEST WATCHES NERVOUSLY AS RUSSIA FLEXES ITS MUSCLES
Moscow is playing tough in relations with neighbours

"New disputes could also emerge, for example, over Ukraine, where Viktor
Yushchenko, a leading candidate to succeed President Leonid Kuchma in
elections this autumn is seen as a threat because he has strong US backing."

Report by Andrew Jack and Stefan Wagstyl
Financial Times, London, UK, Wednesday, March 3, 2004

The nomination of Mikhail Fradkov as Russia's next prime minister will do
little to soften the Kremlin's increasingly assertive foreign policy,
especially in the countries of the former Soviet Union.

Mr Fradkov, a long-serving diplomat whose name was put forward on Monday
by President Vladimir Putin, will bring to the post considerable experience
of international relations. But he will also arrive with a history of close
ties with the security services. While his personal views are not known, he
is a member of the siloviki, the current and former members of the security
services, headed by Mr Putin, who now dominate the Kremlin.

This group has presided over increasing state control in political and
economic affairs. In foreign policy, its members have taken a tougher
approach to Russia's neighbours.

Igor Ivanov, the Russian foreign minister, insists the country has
legitimate interests to protect and is right to challenge US attempts to
increase its influence, for example in Georgia.

In a recent meeting with foreign journalists, Mr Ivanov said: "Our political
scientists are very concerned at how the US has created a circle around
Russia. We have a national strategy and interests in the former Soviet
Union. They reflect historical links that we are developing. They should not
be seen as a re-establishment of Soviet relations . . . The main interest of
Russia is to create around [the country] a security zone."

The country is also concerned about the 20m ethnic Russians living in
surrounding states and about its expanding economic interests, notably
investments by energy companies such as Gazprom, the gas monopoly, and
UES, the electricity giant.

However, the US and the EU are worried about Russia's motives. The European
Commission last month accused Russia of "assertive" behaviour towards
neighbours. A senior American official told the FT there were parallels
between developments in domestic policy and increasing assertiveness towards
former Soviet neighbours.

The arguments date back to the 1990s, when a crisis-torn Russia was forced
to accept the collapse of the Soviet Union and the eastward expansion of
Nato and the European Union. In the past year, led by an effective president
and fuelled by economic recovery, the Kremlin has raised flags on several
fronts.

It began with a dispute last year with Brussels over access to the
Kaliningrad exclave, which will be surrounded by EU territory when Poland
and Lithuania join the union in May. This was followed by a border row with
Ukraine in the Sea of Azov; arguments with Washington over the triumph in
Georgia of Mikheil Saakashvili, the new US-oriented president; and a clumsy
one-sided Russian effort to end the long-standing division of the troubled
state of Moldova.

These disputes have been compounded by Russian attempts to influence the
deployment of Nato forces in the Baltic states, all ex-Soviet republics.
Russia last month threatened to pull out of the Conventional Forces in
Europe treaty, a key east-west accord.

The Kremlin has also raised last-minute objections to the EU's eastward
expansion, complaining of threats to Russia's economic interests. Brussels
wants to extend to its 10 new members the existing partnership and
co-operation agreement (PCA) covering EU-Russia relations. Moscow has
demanded the accord be renegotiated.

Finally, Moscow has demonstrated the political value of its domination of
regional energy supplies by briefly cutting off the main gas pipe to the
west which crosses Belarus. The move was aimed at putting pressure on Minsk
in a payment dispute, but it caused a political storm in Poland.

Some of these rows will settled but others will rumble on. New disputes
could also emerge, for example, over Ukraine, where Viktor Yushchenko, a
leading candidate to succeed President Leonid Kuchma in elections this
autumn is seen as a threat because he has strong US backing.

Mr Putin will almost certainly try to prevent these rows affecting global
relations with the US and leading European states, including France, Germany
and the UK. He knows the west dominates the international community to which
he wants to belong. He also appreciates the US-led anti-terrorism war which
serves Moscow's interests by targetting terrorist threats on Russia's
southern borders.

However, the siloviki and others who want to play tough have plenty of
scope. Mr Fradkov's appointment, which is due to be confirmed later this
week by the Duma, is unlikely to stop them. (END) (ARTUIS)

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"VAST LAND BOUND BY TRAGEDY"
Arkady Ostrovsky reads of dark acts in post-Stalinist Russia, pieced
together with forensic precision...they are part of a vicious circle of
wretchedness, fear, denial and self-destruction which the book describes.

Book Review by Arkady Ostrovsky, FT's Moscow
Financial Times, FT.com site; London, UK, Feb 27, 2004

"Black Earth: Russia After the Fall"
by Andrew Meier, HarperCollins, Euro 25, 511 pages

Three weeks ago, on February 6 2004, a bomb ripped through a Moscow
underground station killing 40 people. Vladimir Putin, the Russian
president, blamed Chechen terrorists for the attack, and hours later a
nationalist Russian politician and Putin supporter called it an "ethnic"
crime. A few days later, a gang of skinheads in St Petersburg, Russia's most
westernised city, killed a nine-year-old Tajik girl in an apparent racist
attack. Her body had 11 knife wounds and bruises from being beaten with a
chain.

These events are not described in "Black Earth," a book by Andrew Meier who
worked as a Time Magazine correspondent in Moscow between 1996 and
2001 - but they are part of a vicious circle of wretchedness, fear, denial
and self-destruction which the book describes.

Meier's book is not strictly a history or political analysis - although it
does provide both. He is first and foremost a reporter who travels across
Russia, recording its striking features, collecting details and personal
testimonies and trying to piece together a portrait of the country 13 years
after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

It is not a flattering portrait. Composed from a hundred small details, it
reveals a nation in limbo, demoralised and haunted by its past, drenched by
a bloody war in Chechnya, faced with alcoholism, Aids and TB - and
uncertain about its future.

It is a thorough journalistic investigation into the state Russia is in
today and it raises core questions which stretch outside the time and
geographic scope of the book. The most burning question of all is posed by
the father of a 20-year-old conscript killed by the Chechens who, in "a
deal" with Russian officers, paid their way through checkpoints: "Can a
country live without a conscience?"

To find out, Meier travels to the four extreme corners of Russia to compose
his portrait: south to Chechnya, north to Norilsk - the site of Stalin's
largest Gulag camps - east to Sakhalin and west to St Petersburg. Divided by
thousands of miles and several time zones, each of these corners of Russia
reveal human tragedies and chilling tales of self-destruction.

His survey of post-Soviet Russia begins in the war-torn republic of
Chechnya. On February 5 2000, two months before Vladimir Putin became
the president of Russia, contract soldiers - "easy to spot because they look
like criminals" - marched into the Chechen village of Aldy. They killed 52
men and eight women, and looted and burned their houses.

In Russian this was called a "zachistka" - a clean-up operation. "To
Chechens 'zachistki' meant state-sponsored terror, pillage, rape and
murder."

Meier collected testimonies from survivors in order to reconstruct minute by
minute, yard by yard, house by house what happened when Russian soldiers
marched into the village. With forensic precision, he separates eye-witness
accounts from hearsay and arrives at a chilling conclusion: what happened in
Aldy was not a zachistka but a massacre, ignored by the world and hushed up
by Russian authorities.

Meier's reporting answers the key questions, when, where, who and how. The
one question he struggles with is why. Why did these soldiers beat and kill
innocent men and women? Why, on the day Putin became president, did a
Russian colonel in another Chechen village hit, rape and kill an 18-year-old
Chechen girl? And what was going on in the head of this colonel when that
very night he celebrated the birth of his own daughter? And, even more
disturbingly, why did people applaud Putin's brutal policy in Chechnya,
which propelled him to the Kremlin and then refuse to hear about its
victims? What kind of country is it?

The subsequent chapters may not provide a full answer, but they give some
idea of what has happened to Russia and its people over the years.

Meier moves north to Norilsk, above the Arctic Circle. But he is also
travelling back in time, winding back the story of Russian suffering.
Norilsk is home to Norilsk Nickel, the word's largest nickel producer, built
on the bones of prisoners from Stalin's Gulag. Today it is controlled by a
Moscow business tycoon.

Meier meets some of the survivors of the Gulag and their children who grew
up playing among the graves of those who perished in the permafrost land -
their bones and skulls still protrude through Norilsk's thin layer of earth.

He is told that in 1953 Soviet troops quelled a revolt in Norilsk by simply
opening fire on the camp and killing at least 100 people. Yet despite all
these atrocities, Stalin's victims continued to believe in the communist
system and in Stalin.

Meier does not link the killings in Norilsk to the atrocities in Chechnya
but they are part of the same tragic chain that binds Russian history.

Stalin was not the first to use forced labour. In 1890 Chekhov travelled to
the island of Sakhalin, infamous for its "katorga" - a system of forced
labour and servitude instituted by Peter the Great. Meier retraces Chekhov's
steps, and finds a place which is rich in oil and gas and poor in every
other aspect of human life, a place where vodka is the only consolation.

Meier ends his journey in St Petersburg, Russia's most beautiful city, yet
the one that has suffered most. The "fairytale", as St Petersburg is
sometimes called, consumed the lives of thousands of those who built it on
the marshes of the Neva river. Its streets still bear the signs of the siege
of Leningrad that lasted 900 days and claimed a million lives.

Back in Moscow, Meier asks an old Jewish woman, who survived both the
ravages of the war and of Stalinism, the difference between Hitler and
Stalin. She answers without a pause: "Hitler killed only his enemies."

Yet despite all the soul-draining descriptions of suffering, Meier's is not
a dark book. It is lightened by his passion for the country and the people
he meets: a doctor who helps the parents of soldiers killed in Chechnya to
identify and bury their children, a woman who entertained the wounded during
the siege of Leningrad, or a historian who dedicated his life to the memoirs
of Stalin's victims.

These are the people who try to break through a vicious circle of
wretchedness. But they face an inhuman task. (END) (ARTUIS)