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Body found floating behind oil company

Police still seek cause of death

Eric Williamson
912.652.0365
eric.williamson@savannahnow.com

The body of a man, discovered about 3 p.m. Thursday floating in the Savannah River behind Colonial Oil, prompted an investigation that had yielded few answers as of late Friday afternoon.

"It didn't look like he had been there very long," said Sgt. Mike Wilson, head of Savannah-Chatham police communications.

http://www.savannahnow.com/stories/052104/2178306.shtml

Nation & World
Sniffing out trouble
Suspicions about a new terrorist attack have U.S. spies scrambling
By Chitra Ragavan and Mark Mazzetti

The chatter was persistent--and alarming. In the weeks after the deadly March bombings of four
commuter trains in Madrid by al Qaeda operatives, the supersecret U.S. surveillance network,
Echelon, intercepted a number of messages from suspected terrorists suggesting planning for a
massive, multipronged assault on the United States. When? Between this summer's political
conventions and October, one month before the presidential election. The intelligence appeared to
confirm information obtained from some seized al Qaeda computers and from several human
sources, government officials say. Officials at the CIA and the National Security Agency, which
runs the Echelon program, believe the information is credible but worry that the human sources
were on the periphery of the now widely dispersed al Qaeda network. Nevertheless, the
information pointed to two, perhaps three, targets, the sources say: New York, Washington, and
Las Vegas. The objective of the suspected attack, the officials continued, would be not only to
cause mass casualties and devastation of U.S. infrastructure but to roil the presidential race. The
Madrid bombings, which killed 191 people and wounded 1,800, also toppled the Spanish
government and triggered the withdrawal of Spanish troops from Iraq. "Since Spain," says a Bush
administration official, "al Qaeda has had the feeling of 'We can do this. We can affect an election.'
"

More:
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/040531/usnews/31cia.htm

Interesting!

May 16, 2004
Morocco Connection Is Emerging as Sleeper Threat in Terror War
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

ABAT, Morocco — They speak in an ever changing code. The word for prison might be hospital. Passport becomes book, or sometimes djellaba, the simple robe worn by men in North Africa. Explosives is honey or sneakers.

And when someone says "the soccer team is ready," an illegal operation is about to start.

The Moroccan branch of militant Islam is not new. But intelligence officials here and in Europe say that until this past year they failed to penetrate its communications and missed its significance. The French worried about Algerians and Tunisians; the Spanish focused on Basques. Belgium, whose Muslim population is largely Moroccan, had fewer than three dozen counterterror specialists in its police force.

Since suicide bombings in Casablanca in May last year that killed dozens, and the devastating train bombings in Madrid this March, Moroccan groups have been seen as central to the terrorist threat in Europe, forcing intelligence and law-enforcement officials to adjust their strategies.

It has been a tortuous undertaking. Morocco has been among the West's closest Arab allies and has long been instrumental in pursuing Arab-Israeli reconciliation. Although Moroccan and European officials now agree that there is a new Moroccan threat, they disagree over its nature and origin — and how to contain it.

One problem is simply identifying major Moroccan terrorists. Two months after the Madrid train bombings, Spanish investigators believe that its mastermind may still be at large.

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