Threat Matrix: Daily Terror Threat

Little red x?

These guys are NOT our friends, nor are they our allies.

Just think, in the spirit of our new found "friendship" coiniciding with the fall of communism, we invited them to train with our armed forces and let them see first hand all of the inner workings of both our battle doctrine and our best technology. Gee, everybody figured we'd all be buds forever...or at least until death do us part....

I'm going to have to re-read this a few times to absorb it all. I learn so much on this thread from Freepers about the world around me.

Thank you for your thoughts.

Doctorzin: Thought you'd be interested in seeing post #3107.

Crap. Can you tell me why my picture went away. It
was there when I previewed and then it was there on
the Thread when I went to make sure it posted. Why
did it disappear?

How in the WORLD is anyone supposed to report seeing this goblin if he can't be ID'd?

Didn't you know? All Goblins, according to media sources, are blonde haired; blue eyed; white; anglo saxon and protestant.

God Bless them.

Go figure??????????????????????????

China willing to help Yukos pay bill to ship oil
MOSCOW - China has agreed to step in and pay Russian rail fees to ensure that it continues to receive Yukos oil if the beleaguered company is unable to cover the transport costs, officials at Russia's rail transport monopoly said.

'China will pay for everything if Yukos encounters problems with payment,' Russian Railways president Gennady Fadeyev said on Wednesday, according to the Interfax news agency.

http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/asia/story/0,4386,268098,00.html

Wrangling Impedes Transfer of Civilian Anthrax Vaccine
By JUDITH MILLER

NYT Via Yahoo News
Published: August 20, 2004

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/20/politics/20anthrax.html?ex=1093579200&en=6009a1d09258e862&ei=5006&partner=ALTAVISTA1

Pulse back to normal now ;-)

"As we learned from 9/11, 18 of the 19 hijackers held valid driving licenses from other states, many of which were obtained through fraudulent means"

Can't you even buy pretty good facsimiles from the internet?

Saudi Arabia Rounds up Muslim Extremists (8/19/04)

UPI - Thursday, August 19, 2004 Date: Thursday, August 19, 2004 6:23:01 AM EST

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, Aug. 19 (UPI) -- Police have rounded up 14 Muslim extremists in Western Saudi Arabia on suspicion of inciting violence and terrorist activities, reports said Thursday.

The London-based Saudi daily al-Hayat said the suspects were arrested in the city of Taif and were being questioned for possible involvement in terrorist activities.

The paper quoted an Interior Ministry spokesman as saying, "The suspects have been taken to detention centers for interrogation, and those who will prove to be not involved in any terrorist action will be released soon."

Saudi Arabia started a nationwide campaign early this year to search for suspected al-Qaida members involved in a spate of terrorist bombings that have killed dozens of people in the past 18 months.

Link to Article

===========

Nuclear Data Found Missing at D-O-E Office in New Mexico (8/19/04)

WASHINGTON For the second time in recent weeks, the Energy Department says some data involving nuclear weapons has turned up missing.

This time it involves the regional office in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The Energy Department says that an "accounting discrepancy" involving three copies of a "controlled removable electronic media" -- or CREM -- was discovered as part of the nationwide inventory of such devices.

The inventory was ordered a month ago after two CREM data devices were reported missing at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, also in New Mexico.

Despite extensive searches, investigators have yet to find those two devices.

D-O-E officials have not suggested the devices were stolen, but are concerned about lax procedures and security.

Link to Article

Can you tell me why my picture went away

Me?? Sorry, I just learned how to do italics recently.

Attempting a pic would put me over the edge. :-)

Thank you grizzfan.

Aug. 19, 2004 18:18 | Updated Aug. 19, 2004 22:23
Police to restrict entry to Temple Mount Friday
By ETGAR LEFKOVITS

Advertisement

Citing intelligence alerts over likely Palestinian disturbances at the Temple Mount after Friday Muslim prayers, Jerusalem police announced Thursday that they will be imposing restrictions on entrance to the holy site on Friday.

All Arab men under the age of 45 will be barred from the midday prayers due to concerns over renewed rioting, police said.

Police sporadically close off the ancient compound to younger male Arabs on Fridays during times of high tension, and following multiple alerts over possible violence at the site.

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=JPost/JPArticle/ShowFull&cid=1092884505314&p=1006688055060

Yep do that.
It made me laugh.
I hope your parents are
having a good vacation.

This spy dude Scheuer is shilling a book, but, still...he has some interesting takes on the other gumshoes:

***

We could have stopped him
The CIA has taken much of the blame for the security lapses that led to 9/11 and the false intelligence on Iraq's WMDs. But now one spy has broken ranks to point the finger at the politicians - and warn that the war on terror could plunge the US into even greater danger.

By Julian Borger

Julian Borger
Friday August 20, 2004

The Guardian

These are not happy times at the CIA. In the space of a few short months, two official reports have found the agency principally to blame for failing to prevent the September 11 al-Qaida attack and for claiming that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt there is a lot of blame to go round. The twin fiascos rank as the worst intelligence failures since the second world war. But the two reports, by the September 11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee respectively, were also testaments to political expedience. Both panels were made up of Republican and Democratic loyalists who reached a political compromise by going relatively easy on both Clinton and Bush administrations, and focused on institutional culprits. The CIA, without a defender after the resignation in July of its long-serving director, George Tenet, presented the easiest target.

Yet most of the agency's rank and file believe they have done little wrong. They were the first to raise the alarm over the danger posed by Osama bin Laden, long before the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa. In 1996 they set up a unit called the Bin Laden Issue Station, codenamed "Alex", dedicated to tracking him down, only to have one operation after another aborted as too politically dangerous.

There are a lot of angry spies at Langley, and one of the angriest is Mike Scheuer, a senior intelligence officer who led the Bin Laden station for four years. While some of his colleagues have vented their frustrations through leaks, Scheuer has done what no serving American intelligence official has ever done - published a book-length attack on the establishment.

His book, Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror, is a fire-breathing denunciation of US counter-terrorism policy. In it, Scheuer addresses the missed opportunities of the Clinton era, but he reserves his most withering attack for the Bush administration's war in Iraq.

He describes the invasion as "an avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked war against a foe who posed no immediate threat but whose defeat did offer economic advantage". He even goes so far as to call on America's generals to resign rather than execute orders that "they know [...] will produce more, not less, danger to their nation". Bin Laden, he believes, is not a lonely maverick, but draws support from much of the Islamic world, which resents the US not for what it is, but for what it does - supporting Israel almost uncritically, propping up corrupt regimes in the Arab world, garrisoning troops on the Saudi peninsula near Islam's most holy sites to safeguard access to cheap oil.

"America ought to do what's in America's interests, and those interests are not served by being dependent on oil in the Middle East and by giving an open hand to the Israelis," Scheuer argues. "If we're less open-handed to Israel over time we can cut down Bin Laden's ability to grow. Right now he has unlimited potential for growing." What makes these comments the more challenging to the Bush administration is that they come from a self-described conservative and instinctive Republican voter.

It seems extraordinary that Scheuer's bosses allowed him to publish his book at all. They had already permitted him one book, Through Our Enemies' Eyes, written anonymously, but that was a more analytical work on Bin Laden and al-Qaida. Imperial Hubris is altogether different: a bitter polemic against orthodoxy and the powers that be.

Scheuer was given the green light only on condition that he stuck to a set of ground rules: he would continue to write as Anonymous, he would not reveal his job or employer, and he would refer only to information that is already "open source" - ie in the public domain. Inevitably, however, given the controversy surrounding the book, his identity has been leaked (first by a liberal weekly, the Boston Phoenix, then this week by the New York Times). Even now, he sticks closely to his employers' guidelines, refusing formally to confirm his identity, while describing his employers vaguely as "the intelligence community". (It is for this reason that he is not permitted by the CIA to be photographed except in silhouette.) Having initially been allowed to give media interviews to promote his book, Scheuer was told earlier this month that he has to ask permission for every interview and to submit an outline of what he is going to say. So far, no interviews have been granted under the new guidelines.

His interview with the Guardian is one of Scheuer's last before being gagged. Burly, bearded and in jeans and a loose shirt, his forceful vocabulary is a far cry from the cautious obfuscation that is the native tongue in Washington. Not that he minds rocking the boat a little. "If getting in somebody's face [helps] prevent the death of 3,000 Americans in New York or the sinking of the Cole in Yemen, or two embassies in East Africa, then I'm in your face," he says.

His bosses at the CIA have not confronted him over the book, other than to tell him what he can or cannot do with the press. "I don't think they get it yet. I still think there's a large group in the American intelligence community who talk about the next big attack but really believe 9/11 was a one-off," he says. "I think they believe their own rhetoric that they've killed two-thirds of the al-Qaida leadership, when they killed two-thirds of what they knew of."

Scheuer says that nearly three years after the September 11 attacks the US intelligence team dedicated to tracking down Bin Laden is still less than 30 strong - the size it was when he left in 1999. The CIA claims that the Bin Laden team is hundreds strong, but Scheuer is insistent that the apparent expansion is skin-deep. "The numbers are big, but it's a shell game. It's people they move in for four or five months at a time and then bring in a new bunch. But the hard core of expertise, of experience, of savvy really hasn't expanded at all since 9/11."

The morass in Iraq, meanwhile, is a "big factor in not allowing us to develop much expertise" on Bin Laden. "I think [director of central intelligence George Tenet] said we had enough people to do two wars at once, and clearly that was a fantasy."

The conclusion of the September 11 Commission - that the al-Qaida plot might have been broken up if the intelligence agencies had cooperated better and shared more information - was accompanied by recommendations for the creation of a national counter-terrorist centre and a national director of intelligence to coordinate the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Scheuer believes this is a classic bureaucratic fix. "I've never known a dysfunctional bureaucracy made better by being made bigger." His answer to the al-Qaida threat, unsurprisingly, is to give his old unit at the CIA, the Bin Laden station, more resources and more firepower.

It is a solution forged by the accumulated bitterness of missed opportunities. In one year under his watch, from May 1998 to May 1999, Scheuer reckons the US had up to a dozen serious chances to kill or capture Bin Laden. Only one was taken - a missile attack on an Afghan training camp in August 1998 - but either the al-Qaida leader was not there, or he had left before the missiles landed.

Months earlier, however, Scheuer believes there was a far better opportunity to grab Bin Laden. The CIA had made a deal with a group of Afghan tribesmen to raid Bin Laden's headquarters near Kandahar and then take him to a desert landing strip, where a US plane would take him either to America or another country for trial. The plan, rehearsed several times over many months, was in Scheuer's view "almost a perfect operation in the sense that there was no US hand visible". But on May 29 1998, according to the narrative in the September 11 Commission's report, Scheuer was informed that the operation had been cancelled because of the risk of civilian casualties.

The pattern was repeated on December 20 the same year, when Scheuer's agents were virtually certain that Bin Laden would be staying the night at a guest house in the Kandahar governor's compound. President Clinton's principal national security advisers once more decided that the danger of collateral damage was too high. Afterwards Scheuer wrote to the top CIA agent in the region, Gary Schroen, saying that he had been unable to sleep after this decision. "I'm sure we'll regret not acting last night," he predicted. Yet another opportunity, in Afghanistan, was missed in 1999.

Other intelligence veterans are more sympathetic to the policymakers' dilemma, pointing out that if the US had shot and missed Bin Laden, while killing others, the country would have been condemned around the world, potentially winning more recruits for al-Qaida. "Mike's is the viewpoint of the soldier versus the viewpoint of a general," argues Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of operations at the CIA's Counter-Terrorist Centre. "There are political judgments made at a higher pay grade. I've been at both sides of that equation and they are difficult judgments to make."

Scheuer counters that the policymakers are just not asking the right questions. "The question is always what happens if we do this and we fail. The question is never what happens to Americans if we don't try this," he says. "When I took my oath of office, it was to preserve and protect and defend the constitution of the US. It wasn't 'to preserve and protect and defend as long as you don't kill an Arab prince, as long as you don't offend the Europeans, as long as you don't hit a mosque with shrapnel'." Scheuer's constant complaints eventually got him removed from his position at the head of the Bin Laden unit and shifted to a more nebulous training role.

To his detractors in the administration, Scheuer is no more than a rogue spy whose career did not turn out the way he had hoped. Certainly he is bitter at being "sidetracked for the past five years without any sort of explanation from my employers", but he insists that the issues he raises are far more important than his career. He says his recent adoption of a child deepened his anxiety about the future of the next American generation if the country sticks to its present course.

But even if the US scores some significant victories against al-Qaida, Scheuer believes the conflict with Islamic extremism will continue to spiral without a fundamental rethink of US priorities in Iraq and a relationship with Israel that "drains resources, earns Muslim hatred and serves no vital US national interest". It is a depressingly pessimistic assessment. Ultimately, "we only have the choice between war and endless war".

· Imperial Hubris is published today by Brassey's, price £12.95.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/alqaida/story/0,12469,1287015,00.html

MI

Unless it's salvage fused.

Violins frantically playing for this one...Terrorism is tough on everyone. We should also remain on guard for similar anecdotal stories that the aclu and other bleeding heart groups will no doubt put forward soon.

***

Material witness in a terrorism case says his life is ruined
Adam Liptak NYT
Friday, August 20, 2004

LAS VEGAS Abdullah al Kidd was on his way to Saudi Arabia to work on his doctorate in Islamic studies in March 2003 when he was arrested as a material witness in a terrorism investigation. An FBI agent marched him across Dulles Airport in Washington in handcuffs.

"It was the most horrible, disgraceful, degrading moment in my life," said Kidd, an American citizen who was known as Lavoni Kidd when he led his college football team, the Vandals of the University of Idaho, in 1995.

The two weeks that followed his arrest, he said, were terrifying. "I was made to sit in a small cell for hours and hours and hours buck naked," he said. "I was treated worse than murderers."

After that, a federal judge ordered him to move in with his in-laws in Las Vegas, where his wife was to stay until she joined him in Saudi Arabia.

Kidd, who described himself as "anti-bin Laden, anti-Taliban, anti-suicide bombing, anti-terrorism," was never charged with a crime and never asked to testify as a witness. In June, 16 months after his arrest, the court said he was free to resume his life.

But at the kitchen table of his dumpy little bachelor apartment in Las Vegas, Kidd said the experience had cost him dearly. He lost his scholarship, he now moves furniture for a living, and his marriage has fallen apart. About 60 other men have been held in terrorism investigations under the federal material witness law since the Sept. 11 attacks, according to a coming report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union.

Such laws, meant to ensure that people with important information do not disappear before testifying, have been used to hold people briefly since the early days of the republic.

But scholars and critics say that in recent years the government has radically reinterpreted what it means to be a material witness.

These days, people held as material witnesses in terrorism investigations are often not called to testify against others; instead, frequently, they are charged with crimes themselves. They lack constitutional protections like the requirement that criminal suspects in custody be informed of their Miranda rights, beginning with the familiar refrain, "You have the right to remain silent." Moreover, they are often held for long periods of time in the same harsh conditions as those suspected of serious crimes.

Mary Jo White, who supervised several major terrorism investigations as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan until 2002, said the frequent and aggressive use of the material witness law in terrorism investigations was a recent development.

"It was really my idea to use the material witness warrant statute in appropriate cases to detain for reasonable periods of time people who might not appear for a grand jury with information related to the 9/11 attacks," she said. The law is, she said, an important tool, but one that must be used judiciously.

"Some of the criticism that has been leveled at it is not wholly unjustified," said White, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton in 1993. "Was enough done to clear the status of the person? Did you hold the person longer than you needed to? Does it really sort out to being in one sense preventive detention? Yes, it does, but with safeguards."

Ronald Carlson, a law professor at the University of Georgia and an expert on the material witness law, said White's account understates the magnitude of the change.

"The law was designed to hold Mr. A, the material witness, to testify about a crime committed by Mr. B, the suspect," he said.

"Now they are locking up Mr. A as a material witness to the crime of Mr. A. The notion is, 'We'll hold him until we develop probable cause to arrest him for a crime.'"

A senior Justice Department official, who declined to be quoted by name, citing the sensitivity of terrorism investigations, dismissed that analysis. "You would be really hard pressed," he said, "if you were able to lift the veil of secrecy on this - and you can't - to find that we've used a material witness warrant to get a solo actor for something he's done on his own."

The official acknowledged, though, that witnesses are frequently charged with crimes.

"If someone has material information," he said, and will not testify, "it tends not to be a nun who walks out of a monastery."

Defense lawyers said that many people willing to testify voluntarily had nonetheless been detained.

"Now everyone who has any conceivable Middle Eastern tie is considered to be a flight risk," said Randall Hamud, a lawyer who has represented three material witnesses.

"That's never been the case before. It's become a very popular device for rounding people up. It's a systemic weapon used against an ethnically identifiable group. It's a holding device."

The distinction between criminal charges and material-witness detentions have blurred, critics say, and sometimes disappear entirely.

Two weeks after Kidd's arrest, Robert Mueller, the director of the FBI, briefed Congress on the government's recent counterterrorism successes.

"Let me give you a few recent examples," he said. The first was the capture of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed in Pakistan. Mueller called him "the mastermind of the Sept. 11th attack."

The second was the arrest of Kidd. Mueller did not mention that Kidd had not been charged with a crime.

"My reputation is destroyed," Kidd said recently. "I keep getting 'no's' from jobs as if I'm an ex-felon."

In defending the use of material-witness warrants in a letter to a congressional committee last year, Jamie Brown, a Justice Department official, described the safeguards established to prevent injustices.

"Every single person detained as a material witness as part of the Sept. 11 investigation," Brown wrote, "has been represented by counsel" and "was found by a federal judge to have information material to the grand jury's investigation."

Witnesses are free to speak about a case, Brown continued, though, "The fact that few have elected to do so suggests they wish their detentions to remain nonpublic."

Jamie Fellner, the director of the U.S. programs for Human Rights Watch, said some detainees faced the worst of two worlds. "Material witnesses have, ironically, fewer protections than people charged with a crime," Fellner said, using the examples of the omission of a Miranda warning and sometimes less-than-prompt access to lawyers.

Kidd, the former football star, was held in the case of Sami Omar al-Hussayen, tried in June in federal court in Idaho on charges of using his computer skills to support terrorists. The jury found Hussayen not guilty of the more serious charges and deadlocked on others. The restrictions on Kidd's travel were lifted and his passport returned.

Kidd, who converted to Islam in college, was held for three days at a Virginia detention center, in a cell known as the fishbowl. Its previous occupants included, he was told, Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh, who is serving a 20-year sentence for aiding the Taliban.

Of his marriage, he said: "This ordeal has dissolved our relationship. I lost a good wife. I'm not with my daughter anymore. How painful is that?"

The New York Times

Copyright © 2004 The International Herald Tribune | www.iht.com

http://www.iht.com/articles/534885.html

In the beginning
The 9/11 terrorist outrage started with a group of al-Qaida plotters holed up together in a German flat. Peter Bergen reports on a new film that attempts to understand their motives

Peter Bergen
Friday August 20, 2004

The Guardian

We all know how the tragic story of Hamburg Cell will end, but the question that Channel 4's new film tries to answer is: how did the 9/11 plot first take shape? Hamburg Cell focuses on a group of young Middle Easterners who arrived in Germany during the 1990s, and their unlikely transformation from nondescript students to key players in the 9/11 conspiracy. As the final report of the 9/11 commission pointed out last month, Osama bin Laden initially conceived of using more established members of al-Qaida to execute the attacks on Washington and New York, but decided instead to use the "Hamburg group [who] added the enormous advantages of fluency in English and familiarity with life in the west" - attributes that were necessary to learn how to fly at technically demanding American flight schools, and for the meticulous planning of the 9/11 operation.

Two of the 9/11 pilots are the central focus here: the lead hijacker, Egyptian Muhammad Atta, and Zaid Jarrah, a gregarious Lebanese party boy who would go on to crash United Airlines flight 93 in Pennsylvania. In an implicit recognition that efforts to describe a typical "terrorist personality" are inherently futile, Hamburg Cell shows that Atta and Jarrah could not have been more different. Atta is portrayed as a priggish, prickly fanatic, whose misogyny extended to instructions in his will that no women should visit his grave.

How Atta developed this persona is something of a mystery, although the film-makers suggest one possibility: on his return to his native Cairo after years of study in Germany, Atta is confronted by his father, an unyielding martinet, who coldly demands that he continue his studies in Hamburg. Atta's rigid personality may simply have been a family trait.

Jarrah is a complete contrast: the good-looking scion of a wealthy Lebanese family, the one person in the Hamburg cell who was most likely to abandon a life of jihadist terrorism for a conventional existence, Jarrah even has a lover, Aysel Senguen, the attractive daughter of Turkish immigrants, for whom he cooks elaborate, alcohol-fuelled meals. The story of Hamburg Cell largely traces Jarrah's metamorphosis from a wine-quaffing medical student to an Islamist zealot intent on mass murder. The film nicely captures how Jarrah, newly arrived in a relentlessly grey, rainy Germany, naturally gravitated to the local mosque, where he could find companionship. Jarrah tells the imam of the mosque that his family isn't religious, to which the cleric replies, "Here, we are your brothers. We can help you."

Over time Jarrah becomes more observant, attending the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg, which would become a hub for the 9/11 plotters. Jarrah grows a beard and his relationship with his girlfriend Aysel becomes increasingly contentious. At one point Aysel asks him: "What is more important to you - jihad or marrying me? Why would I marry a man who will be dead in two years?" While such conversations appear to be the reconstruction of the filmmakers, they have the ring of truth as Aysel would testify in a later terrorism trial that she progressively lost Jarrah to the influence of his jihadist friends.

We also see that discussions at the mosque were as much political as religious. In one scene, a bearded elder tells Jarrah and his fellow worshippers that the Serbs instigated a Muslim holocaust in Yugoslavia during the early 1990s, a holocaust that is being repeated in places like Chechnya, Indonesia and Kashmir, and that they must therefore "train for jihad". And so, in 1999 Atta and Jarrah resolved to go to fight jihad in Chechnya.

What would take them instead to Afghanistan were not contacts in the al-Quds mosque, but a chance encounter on a German train with an Islamic radical who provided them with introductions to al-Qaida. This episode is not recounted in the film, as it only became public in July. This encounter changes much of our understanding of the Hamburg cell who, it turns out, had no intention of attacking the US until they had travelled to Afghanistan, a trip that hinged on a simple quirk of fate. Of such contingencies history is made.

In Afghanistan Atta and Jarrah train to become members of al-Qaida in a sequence that exactly mirrors an actual al-Qaida training tape. Atta and Jarrah are then approached by al-Qaida's military commander Khalid Sheik Mohammed who tasks them with the plan to attack the US using planes. (In reality, according to the 9/11 commission, Atta met with bin Laden himself to discuss "a preliminary list of approved targets: the World Trade Centre, the Pentagon and the US Capitol".) On his return to Germany, Jarrah is contacted by members of his worried family who tell him that he must abandon his obsession with jihad. Jarrah placates his family and Aysel, by now his wife, by saying that he is going to leave Hamburg for Florida to learn how to become a pilot, far from the influence of his jihadist buddies.

In fact, it is in Florida where the key 9/11 plotters would all meet up. And yet, even as the planning for the operations against Washington and New York is in its final stages, still Jarrah feels the pull of the temptations of the west, downing a beer at a barbecue. When Atta later smells the alcohol on Jarrah's breath he denounces him. Indeed, according to the 9/11 commission, simmering tensions between Atta and Jarrah were a concern to al-Qaida's leaders, because they threatened to sabotage the entire plan.

As the 9/11 plot moves into high gear, Aysel visits her beloved husband in Florida for what is, unbeknown to her, their final carefree moment together. Jarrah even takes her to one of his flying lessons, a chilling scene that takes place inside a passenger jet flight simulator. At the controls of the simulator Jarrah turns to Aysel saying: "Soon I'll be doing this for real." Of course, the only time Jarrah will fly a passenger jet for real will be his first, and only, flight.

The film ends, as it begins, with Jarrah in the departure lounge at Newark airport before he boards his flight to Los Angeles placing a final call to Aysel leaving her a message of love. That love will not stop Jarrah from killing himself and 43 others on the plane that he will soon crash into a field in Pennsylvania. As Osama bin Laden has said about members of al-Qaida: "We love death more than you love life." Ultimately, why that should be the case is not something that Hamburg Cell can adequately explain, probably because the explication of such beliefs lies more in the realm of theology than film-making.

· Hamburg Cell is screened at the Edinburgh film festival on August 25 and 26, and will be shown on Channel 4 in September. Peter Bergen is the author of Holy War, Inc: Inside the Secret World of Osama bin Laden

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1286324,00.html

8/19/04

Mercury News

'Wack the Iraq' boardwalk arcade criticized as tasteless, anti-Arab

Associated Press

WILDWOOD, N.J. - A live-target paintball game in which patrons take aim at runners dressed as Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden has drawn fire from critics who say the game is tasteless and can only encourage violence against Arabs.

"We don't need any more games that would encourage people to hate Arabs or kill them," said Aref Assaf, president of the New Jersey Chapter of American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.

Assaf has called on local officials to shut the game down, which he considers hate speech. He also wants Wildwood visitors to boycott it.

The game, known as "Wack the Iraq" - not Iraqi - has been on the board walk in Wildwood for at least a year, but has only recently drawn complaints, said Mayor Ernie Troiano Jr.

Troiano agrees the game is tasteless but said it was no more likely to encourage violence than many popular video games. He also said the city was powerless to shut the game down because of the operator's free speech rights.

"You go out and tell him that he can't do this, you're going to have a lawsuit that you cannot win," Troiano said.

The game is at the end of Morey's Pier, but an employee of Morey's said the game is not operated by the company.

Troiano said the operator was Andrew Weiner, whose family has operated arcades along the boardwalk for more than 50 years. A telephone listing for the arcade could not be found. Weiner's mother, Rhoda Weiner, who is retired from the arcade business, said she did not believe her son operated the game.

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/special_packages/iraq/9444810.htm?1c

That'd be a lot to rely on. If their intent is to detonate over friendly territory, I'm not sure they'd want to depend on an interception to do it for them.