This is an email I get, someone used to post this but I haven't seen it lately. So I am just going to post the whole email FYI.
April 2, 2005
www.siteinstitute.org
Terrorism Headlines of the Week
Domestic
Judge in Moussaoui Case Says Trial Date Will Be Set Soon
ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A federal judge said Monday she would soon set a trial date for Zacarias Moussaoui, the only U.S. defendant charged in connection with the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
U.S. District Judge Leonie Brinkema said the government and Moussaoui's lawyers have conferred privately and agreed on a trial schedule. Brinkema did not reveal the agreement, but said she has concerns with the proposal. She promised, in a two-page order, to set a date "in the near future."
Moussaoui is charged with participating in an al-Qaida conspiracy to commit terrorism that included the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon.
Source: Associated Press
U.S. Barred From Sending 13 Detainees Abroad
A federal judge yesterday barred the Bush administration from transferring a group of detainees from the U.S. military prison in Cuba to the custody of foreign governments without first giving the prisoners a chance to challenge the move in court.
U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy Jr. said he was preventing transfers without advance notice to bar the government from "unilaterally and silently taking actions" to move detainees outside the reach of U.S. courts. The government must give detainees' lawyers 30 days' notice of any proposed transfer, the judge ruled, so their lawyers have time to object.
The judge also chided the Justice Department for arguing it was giving detainees what they had originally requested: freedom from U.S. control at the naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. About 540 men are held at the prison based on the government's claim that they are enemy combatants or have ties to terrorists. Some have been there for three years.
The Bush administration has been grappling with how to handle terrorism detainees over the long term. Officials have said they were considering transferring some of the prisoners to their home countries where they would be imprisoned, which prompted lawyers for a number of detainees to file court challenges.
Source: The Washington Post
U.S. to Step Up Security on Border with Mexico
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - More than 700 additional Border Patrol agents will be sent to Arizona this year to help stop potential terrorists and illegal immigrants from entering the United States from Mexico, officials said on Wednesday.
Department of Homeland Security officials said an additional 534 agents would be permanently assigned to the border and 200 others would be sent on temporary duty for fiscal 2005 to crack down on illegal immigration and disrupt smuggling operations.
The changes would boost the total number of border agents in Arizona to about 3,000, officials said.
Source: Reuters
Convicted Terrorist Deported To Lebanon After Prison Term
A Lebanese hijacker, the first terrorist convicted in the United States for an attack against U.S. citizens on foreign soil, was deported Monday after nearly 16 years in federal prison, authorities said yesterday.
Fawaz Yunis, a member of the Amal Militia in Lebanon, led the 1985 hijacking of Royal Jordanian Airlines Flight 402 in Beirut. Yunis and four gunmen unsuccessfully tried to fly to Cyprus before returning to Beirut, where they blew up the plane after releasing the passengers unharmed. Two of the hostages were U.S. citizens.
Source: Associated Press
Suit by Detainee on Transfer to Syria Finds Support in Jet's Log
WASHINGTON, March 29 - Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable.
Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar's account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.
The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.
In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar's lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.
Source: The New York Times
Zarqawi Aide Held by U.S. Military in Iraq
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The U.S. military in Iraq is holding a man it believes to be the first American captured fighting for the Iraqi insurgency. Pentagon officials describe the man, who holds U.S. and Jordanian citizenship, as a senior associate of terrorist leader Abu Musab Zarqawi.
He was captured in a raid at his home in Iraq in late 2004, Matthew Waxman, the Pentagon's deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, said in an interview Thursday.
Officials declined to provide his name or hometown or identify him other than to say he functioned as Zarqawi's emissary to insurgent groups in several cities in Iraq.
Zarqawi, who has declared his allegiance to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network, is the most wanted man in Iraq, and is tied to numerous bombings and kidnappings since the U.S.-led invasion removed Saddam Hussein from power two years ago.
Defense officials also believe the captured American helped coordinate the movement of insurgents and money into Iraq, and provided support for kidnappings carried out by Zarqawi's operatives, Waxman said.
Source: Associated Press
Trial Begins in Texas for Brothers Accused of Helping Hamas
DALLAS (AP) - Three brothers went on trial Thursday on charges of aiding terrorists by funneling money to a high-ranking official in the militant Palestinian group Hamas.
Prosecutor James T. Jacks said the men tried to hide a $250,000 investment from the political official - who was declared a terrorist by the U.S. government in 1995 - in the brothers' computer company by making it look as if it came from the Hamas official's wife.
Ghassan, Basman and Bayan Elashi face 21 counts of conspiracy, money laundering and dealing in the property of a terrorist.
The three men, plus two of their brothers, were arrested in December 2002. Then-Attorney General John Ashcroft said the arrests showed authorities would prosecute terrorists and "the terrorist supporters who write the check."
Source: Associated Press
How Bitterness Tainted Links With the C.I.A.
WASHINGTON, March 31 - Fresh details emerge in the presidential commission's report about a little-known power struggle still raging inside American intelligence, between the government's terrorist threat analysis center and the C.I.A.'s own counterterrorism unit.
This fight illustrates one of the report's most significant themes: how chronic turf wars among government agencies fractured and undermined the country's response to terror threats.
The report details a behind-the-scenes struggle focused on an organization known initially as the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which was proposed by President Bush in his 2003 State of the Union address.
Source: The New York Times
After Repeated Delays, Ahmed Ressam to be Sentenced Next Month
SEATTLE - Ahmed Ressam, convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium, is to be sentenced April 27 in a hearing that has been repeatedly delayed to ensure his cooperation in other terrorism cases.
The date is set "in stone," federal prosecutor Mark Bartlett said Thursday.
Ressam, an Algerian national, was caught smuggling explosives into the United States through Port Angeles in December 1999. He was convicted in April 2001 of nine charges, including terrorist conspiracy.
Source: Associated Press
For F.B.I., Not Enough Progress in Combating Terrorism
WASHINGTON, March 31 - The Federal Bureau of Investigation has made "insufficient progress" in areas crucial to recasting itself as a frontline defense against terrorism, and major restructuring at both the F.B.I. and the Justice Department is still needed, the presidential commission on intelligence concluded Thursday.
The report offered a sobering assessment of the work done at the F.B.I. in correcting the intelligence and analytical failures that preceded the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City and the Pentagon.
The report said that while top F.B.I. officials appeared determined to overcome bureaucratic problems, technological hurdles and turf wars with other intelligence agencies, "the outcome is still in doubt," and some areas had clearly lagged. In several important areas, it said, the F.B.I. "has made significant but, in our view, insufficient progress."
Source: The New York Times
International
More Foreign Fighters Entering Iraq: US General
Foreign fighters entering Iraq in recent months make up a growing percentage of insurgents battling US troops and the country's fledgling security force, according to a senior US military commander.
In an interview with CNN in Mosul, General John Abizaid - the commander of US Central Command which covers Iraq - said that while most insurgents appear to be Iraqis, "the percentage of foreign fighters over the past several months seems to have increased".
He also said the insurgents' ranks likely include "former Baathist criminals".
"It seems to be pretty well established that they tend to cross over from Syria, although we know that there have been some infiltrations from the Saudi border, there have been some from the Iranian border," General Abizaid said.
Source: Agence France Presse
Improvised Bomb Found Near Spanish Embassy in Philippines
MANILA : Philippines police said they defused an explosive device found near the Spanish embassy in Manila, as security forces were on alert after warnings of attacks over the Easter period.
Spanish foreign ministry officials in Madrid said meanwhile that two explosive devices were discovered near the embassy and destroyed, causing no damage.
Manila police chief Avelino Razon said a marine guard had noticed an explosive, made from "black powder and rigged to a cellular phone", outside the building housing the embassy in the Makati financial district.
The guard called the police and the improvised bomb was destroyed.
Source: Agence France Presse
Iraqi Contract Workers Say Fear Is Part of the Job
BAGHDAD, March 27 -- In the insurgents' war of bombs and bullets against Iraqis cooperating with U.S. forces, Lamya Yusef, a contract worker at a U.S. military base, comes armed with a rearview mirror.
Attackers firing automatic weapons killed five of her fellow office workers in Baghdad last week as the women drove home from the fortified Green Zone that houses U.S. and Iraqi government installations. A colleague at the U.S. base where she works in Baghdad was killed just a week earlier, when gunmen shot the woman as she pulled into her parking spot in front of her house, Yusef said. The killing of a man in Yusef's neighborhood two days ago gave neighbors an inkling that he, too, may have been a U.S. military contract worker.
And Sunday, a video posted on a Web site purportedly by the extremist group al Qaeda in Iraq showed what appeared to be the killing of an Interior Ministry worker. The group, headed by Abu Musab Zarqawi, said in the video that the man was shot because he was a liaison officer with U.S. forces. An Interior Ministry spokesman said, however, that the man had been a desk worker in a ministry operations room in the Green Zone.
Yusef commutes with several other Iraqi co-workers to Camp Victory, a U.S. base near Baghdad's airport on one of the city's most heavily targeted routes. "We just look in the mirror, change our route every two days, change our car every two days and ask our God for help," she said.
Source: The Washington Post
Syria Pulls 2,000 More Troops From Lebanon
Syria has cut back its troops in Lebanon to the lowest level in three decades as 2,000 more soldiers returned home in recent days, the Lebanese military said Monday.
The move put Damascus on track to have all its forces out of Lebanon before parliamentary elections in May, meeting a key U.S. and U.N. demand.
Despite the troop withdrawal, pressure mounted on Syria and the allied Lebanese government to complete the pullout quickly, hold elections on time and cooperate with an international inquiry into former Lebanese premier Rafik Hariri's Feb. 14 assassination.
Lebanon's acting Foreign Ministry chief, Butros Asaker, flew to New York for a United Nations Security Council session aimed at forming an international inquiry into Hariri's killing.
Source: Associated Press
Egypt Cracks Down on Muslim Brotherhood
CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt has detained more than 90 members or supporters of the banned Muslim Brotherhood and on Sunday blocked the group, Egypt's largest opposition force, from holding a demonstration calling for political reform.
Thousands of riot police lined roads in central Cairo to stop demonstrators gathering for the protest in front of parliament. A few hundred of the protesters managed to regroup to hold demonstrations in other central Cairo locations.
The Interior Ministry said in a statement that police detained 50 of them for refusing to disperse. It said the demonstration had not been approved and was unnecessary anyway because Egyptians had other channels for expression.
Leading Brotherhood member Essam el-Erian told Reuters the authorities had earlier detained 49 of the protest organizers. A Brotherhood official said seven of them, including senior member Abdel Monem Aboul Fotouh, were released later on Sunday.
An official said the 49 men, arrested in five separate sweeps late on Saturday, were found "in possession of books and publications opposed to the system of government" and suspected of recruiting new Brotherhood members and "disturbing security."
Source: Reuters
Defendant in Al Qaida Plot to Bomb British Embassy
An alleged terrorist told a court today that he plotted to blow up the British Embassy in Yemen’s capital and he recruited seven other men to the al Qaida terror network.
Anwar Bayan Sadiq al-Gaylani, an Iraqi man of Swiss nationality, is standing trial with seven alleged accomplices on charges of planning to attack the British and Italian embassies in San’a, as well as the French cultural centre.
Today’s hearing, the trial’s second, was held amid extremely tight security. Armored vehicles and 4x4s with mounted machine guns blocked all streets leading to the court. Snipers watched from rooftops.
Asked to plead, al-Gaylani gave a long, rambling reply in which he admitted certain parts of the charge sheet, but denied others.
Source: Associated Press
Terror: The Hunt for Zarqawi's Webmasters
April 4 issue - Intelligence and law-enforcement agencies are learning that tracking down the operators of Islamic terrorist Web sites is like trying to locate a floating craps game: here today, gone tomorrow. During the past year, investigators in America and Europe watched as a business called 357Hosting, based near Utrecht, the Netherlands, became the officially registered Internet host for several notorious militant Islamic Web pages and bulletin boards, including sites that disseminated videos of beheadings of foreign hostages in Iraq and messages from Qaeda leader Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi. The public prosecutor's office in Utrecht tells NEWSWEEK that it has opened a criminal investigation into possible Internet hate crimes.
But the former operator of the hosting company claims that ownership of the firm has already moved out of the Netherlands. In e-mails, 357Hosting's former chief, who asked to be called "Awad," acknowledged that his business last year hosted Web sites "that may be deemed as radical," including sites that glorify the actions of Iraqi militants and others promoting the Palestinian resistance. Information on 357Hosting's own site indicates that the Dutch firm offered Islamic groups bargain-basement rates, from as little as 4.99 euro ($6.47) per month. Awad says a former owner of 357 even offered Islamic groups free space, raising questions among investigators as to whether 357's rates were subsidized by wealthy Islamists from outside the Netherlands. One site hosted by 357, Albasrah.net, today features what purport to be daily news bulletins from Iraqi terrorists; other sites 357 has hosted include Hamasonline.com and Shareeah.org, a site promoting the wisdom of Abu Hamza, a notorious London imam who now awaits trial in Britain on terror-related charges. Both Dutch and U.S. investigators say 357 also hosted sites that were among the first to distribute Iraqi beheading videos. Awad, however, says that 357 had been wrongly accused of hosting such material because the sites that really did display the beheading videos at one point were hosted on the same computer servers that 357 bought space from.
Source: Newsweek
Uzbek Court Sentences Key Member of Islamic Group to 19 Years in Jail
An Uzbek court Monday handed a 19-year jail sentence to a man alleged to be a key member of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), an insurgent group blamed for a series of deadly attacks in Central Asia, officials said.
Husniddin Juraev, 29, was found guilty of terrorism, attempting to overthrow the government, as well as provoking ethnic, religious and racial discord, his lawyer Samariddin Rustamov told AFP.
Juraev denied all charges against him, arguing that he had never partaken in armed clashes but was in charge of IMU's public relations, including preparation of promotional videos and text.
Source: Agence France Presse
Four on Trial in Paris for Helping Assassins of Afghan Resistance Hero
PARIS (AFP) - Four suspected Islamist radicals went on trial in a Paris court Tuesday for allegedly helping the men who killed Afghan resistance hero Ahmad Shah Masood two days before the September 11, 2001 attacks.
French prosecutors believe the four men helped the two Tunisians traveling with fake Belgian passports. Posing as journalists, they detonated a bomb hidden in a camera on September 9, 2001, killing Masood.
The death of the Northern Alliance leader, who fought against the Taliban that then ruled Afghanistan, took place just two days before the al-Qaeda attacks on US targets that killed some 3,000 people.
The four primary suspects face a maximum of 10 years in prison for criminal association in relation with a terrorist enterprise, as do three co-defendants suspected of organising training camps for Islamic holy war recruits in France.
Source: Agence France Presse
Iran Takes Journalists Inside Key Nuclear Plant
NATANZ, Iran, March 30 (Reuters) - Iranian President Mohammad Khatami took a group of journalists deep underground on Wednesday into the heart of a nuclear plant which Washington wants dismantled and whose existence was kept secret until 2002.
About 30 local and foreign journalists visited Natanz uranium enrichment facility, 250 km (150 miles) south of Tehran, the centrepiece of a disputed atomic fuel drive that Tehran suspended under international pressure in late 2003.
The unprecedented visit was an unusual gesture of openness by the Islamic state. Reporters, allowed to photograph and film the unimposing complex, were later shown parts of another atomic facility in the central city of Isfahan.
Iran says its nuclear programme is nothing for the world to fear and will only be used to generate much-needed electricity. But Washington and the European Union fear Iran could use its nuclear plants to produce bombs.
The journalists, invited to accompany Khatami on a tour of the 450-hectare (1,110-acre) site, were taken inside a building where, two levels below ground, they were shown a vast empty hall designed to house 50,000 enrichment centrifuges.
Source: Reuters
Former Alberta Man Charged in Plot to Wage Worldwide Jihad
A former Edmonton-area cinema owner has been charged in the United States with raising cash and recruiting Muslim extremists in North America throughout the 1990s to help wage a worldwide Islamic jihad.
Kassem Daher, linked by CSIS to al-Qaeda, is a Lebanese native who came to Canada in the 1980s as a business immigrant. Daher, who once ran movie theatres in Leduc and Ponoka, left Canada in 1998.
In 2000, he was arrested in Lebanon after a shootout between police and alleged terrorists. After his arrest,
Daher's relatives denied he was ever involved in terrorism and urged the Canadian government to intervene on his behalf. He was never formally charged with a crime in Lebanon or Canada and has been free on bail for the past year, Barbara Campion, a spokeswoman for CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service) told CanWest News Service on Tuesday.
But a criminal complaint unsealed this week in Florida named Daher -- along with three other men, including a former Detroit public school administrator -- as co-conspirators in a network aimed at supporting terrorist activities around the globe.
Source: Edmonton Journal
Pakistan Catches Six Al-Qaeda-linked Suspects
ISLAMABAD : Pakistani security agencies have arrested six suspected Al-Qaeda-linked foreigners in a swoop on their hideout near the Afghan border.
The men, believed to be Afghans and Central Asians, were seized on Wednesday in an upscale neighbourhood of Peshawar, a major northwestern frontier town, following a tip-off by intelligence sources.
It is the latest round-up in key US ally Pakistan's crackdown on suspects linked to the network of Osama bin Laden, who has eluded a major manhunt since the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001.
The authorities seized two hand grenades, a pistol, computer disks and militant literature, an interior ministry official told AFP.
Source: Agence France Presse
Key Former Taleban Commander Surrenders in Afghanistan
KABUL - A former Taleban commander has surrendered to the Afghan government, one of most high-profile figures to do so since the regime was toppled more than three years ago, officials said on Friday.
Commander Abdul Waheed handed himself over to the authorities in southeastern Helmand province to take advantage of a planned amnesty announced by Kabul early this year, provincial intelligence chief Dad Mohammad Khan said.
US-backed President Hamid Karzai’s administration has been in talks with a number of former Taleban leaders in recent months but has not announced the final details of the amnesty scheme.
Waheed has now moved to the Afghan capital Kabul where he is expected to meet Karzai.
“He was a key Taleban commander. His surrender will help to bring other Taleban in,” Khan told AFP by telephone.
Source: Agence France Presse
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