Think our enemies are confined to the Middle East? Think again. Jim Kouri explains. Terrorists Training in South America Threaten US National Security
As Americans remember the horror of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington more than five years ago, the U.S. borders are practically as porous as ever. Yet Americans get few answers during the heated debate. What many hear are abstractions about tightening border security with no mention of how that is to be achieved.
According to testimony given to the US House of Representatives Armed Services Committee by General Peter Pace, then Vice Chairman, now Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Hamas has joined Hezbollah and al Qaeda in the Triple Frontier Zone in Latin America where the borders of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay converge.
There the Islamic terror groups train recruits, gather intelligence on targets, launder money and sell drugs. There is evidence that these terrorists and narco-terrorists will soon migrate north into the United States. He cited terrorism reports indicating terrorist groups are active in Canada and Central-South America.
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http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/terrorism.php?id=609380
Alarm over how-to internet bomb videos
16 January 2007
AMSTERDAM — The Dutch national counter-terrorism chief has raised concern about the rise of so-called virtual terrorist training camps on the internet. Tjibbe Joustra — the chief of the anti-terrorism co-ordination point NTCb — said radical Muslim organisations operate between 100 and 200 websites. He said the websites offer written bomb-making manuals and step-by-step video instructions.
Currently, the websites are in Arabic but Joustra said in the television programme NOVA that he expects Dutch-language versions will soon be able. Written bomb instructions have been circulating around the internet for years. But there are now accompanying pictures and footage to show people exactly how they could make a bomb belt, for example. Joustra said the internet enables radical groups to aim their propaganda at target audiences in Dutch society.
http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=19&story_id=35594
SEATTLE -- A convicted Taliban collaborator who was arrested in Belize - despite orders that he not leave the U.S. - could face a new trial on charges of offering support to terrorists if he's found guilty of violating his probation, a federal prosecutor said.
James Ujaama, a Muslim convert, was in federal custody without bail after a court hearing Tuesday. Authorities say he fled to Belize, where he was arrested in mid-December with a fake Mexican passport.
Ujaama served two years in prison after pleading guilty in 2003 to conspiring to provide cash, computers and fighters to the Taliban. During three years of probation, he was to surrender his passport and needed written permission from the U.S. attorney's office in Seattle to travel internationally. "I don't know what he was thinking," Assistant U.S. Attorney Todd Greenberg said after the hearing.
Ujaama denied the accusations in his brief court appearance. He faces as many as two years in prison if a judge agrees he violated his probation, and more serious consequences if the government backs out of its plea agreement. In that event, the government could file new charges that he offered support to terrorists, and any statements Ujaama has made to U.S. authorities could be used against him in the new case, Greenberg said.
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Iranian Arrested In Erbil Is Wanted In Austria
Tehran, 17 Jan. 2007 - One of the five Iranians arrested last week by the US army in the northern Iraqi city of Erbil is wanted in Austria in connection with the assassination of Kurdish leader Andol Rahman Ghassemlu in 1989. Mahommad Jaafari Sharoudi was one of five Iranian officials detained last week in the Kurdish-controlled city on charges of being connected to a faction of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, the Pasdaran, that funds and arms insurgents in Iraq.
Abdol Rahman Ghassemlu, the historic leader of Iranian Kurds, was killed in an apartment in the outskirts of the Austrian capital Vienna where he was scheduled to meet a delegation sent by then Iranian president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani.
However, shortly after the start of the meeting between a delegation of the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (PDKI) and Tehran's delegation, a special unit of the Pasdaran is believed to have stormed the apartment and killed Ghassmlu and his aides. According to the Austrian police, the killers escaped arrest by hiding in Iran's embassy in Vienna.
Austrian sources claim that Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was at the time a Pasdaran official, was the logistics' head of the commando group responsible for the Kurdish leader's death while Jaafari Sharoudi was one of the killers.
http://www.adnki.com/index_2Level_English.php?cat=Terrorism&loid=8.0.377268905&par=0