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WASHINGTON (September 13) - US Secretary of State Colin Powell urged Foreign Minister Shimon Peres and Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat in the strongest terms yesterday to meet as soon as possible, as he faced questions about whether the massive terrorist strikes on the US Tuesday could be linked to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Powell spoke with Peres, Arafat, and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and called on them to settle squabbles about a venue and start talking. "I encouraged all sides to get this process of meetings started that we have all been waiting for, for Mr. Arafat and Mr. ...

A Vast Conspiracy Hatched in the Dark? September 12: Given the scale in time and dimensions of this last appalling conspiracy against America, none of DEBKAfile’s intelligence experts can explain how it came to fruition without any Western intelligence community noticing what was going on. The pre-planning must have taken years and involved hundreds if not thousands of strategists, activists, helpers, spotters, couriers, sleepers, controllers and spiritual leaders – and their families. Large sums of cash must have moved between countries. And indeed, on Wednesday, scant hours after the shocking disasters in New York and Washington, the FBI was bursting ...

If I were the guy coordinating all this, I would have predicted the FAA shutdown of airports, and I would have another caper planned for when the airports reopen. I would also have predicted the resumption of the practice of putting plainclothes armed sky marshals on all hijackable flights. Therefore, during the training for this series of events, I would have selected my most ideologically zealous and least technically proficient trainee. When flights resume, I would schedule him along with another suicide team on a cross-country airliner. His job, once the flight got going, would be to jump out of ...

PEARL HARBOR is the only thing in this century that can compare to the terrorist catastrophe that has struck the United States. With all its shock and tragedy, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ended our naive innocence about the dangerous world we live in and united a very disunited country. Will this series of attacks unite Americans today? Will it make a dent in the lofty citizen-of-the-world types among the intelligentsia who like to treat international borders as just arbitrary lines on a map, who dismiss talk of enemies as paranoia or politics, and who delight to snipe ...

Supposedly recognised by salesman in FLorida, who called FBI. He is supposedly talking Developing

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The United States said on Thursday it had ordered U.S. national airspace reopened to commercial and private aviation effective at 11 a.m. EDT. U.S. Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta said in a statement that U.S. airports will be reopened and flights resumed on a case-by-case basis, only after they implement more stringent levels of security imposed following Tuesday's attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "I must caution everyone that a system as diverse and complex as ours cannot be brought back up instantly," Mineta said in the statement distributed by the White House. "We will ...

Many of us (especially those in small towns) have trouble comprehending the size of the World Trade Center. On the news they are now telling about a mall and transportation center in the basement... ? Could someone please refer us to a website that shows maps, etc, so that we can understand the news better?

The alleged mastermind of those attacks, Mr bin Laden, has reportedly vowed to celebrate the anniversary with another attack on American interests. And, according to Western diplomats and Nato officers, his supporters continue to live in Bosnia under the protection of Bosnian Muslim government officials. A few thousand mujahedin, foreign Islamic fundamentalists, came here to fight beside their Muslim brethren during Bosnia's 1992-95 war. While many were killed, or left the country at the end of the war, a few hundred remained, were given Bosnian citizenship, and the protection of the government in areas ruled by the Muslim nationalist Party ...

EVEN as thousands of his followers danced in the streets throughout the Palestinian Authority to celebrate the unprecedented carnage inflicted on America, Yasser Arafat went before the TV cameras to declare that he was "shocked" at the "unbelievable" series of attacks. There's no doubt that Arafat is horrified --- but not necessarily at the incomprehensible body toll, which dwarfs the PLO bloody, decades-long history of murder and mayhem against innocent civilians. No, Arafat must fear that -- at long last -- the West may finally have woken up to the legitimate threat that terrorism poses. And that Americans, hit so ...

<p>AS all Americans grapple with the painful fact of our national complacency in the face of terrorism, America's chattering and scribbling classes are going to face a reckoning of their own - an accounting of their complacency and willful blindness in the face of a growing evil. Tuesday, both before and after the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, two elite American institutions offered stark portraits of the complacency that helped lure this nation into a false sense of security.</p>

Apologies in advance for cluttering up the BREAKING NEWS side bar. This, from a Canadian newspaper, is worth sharing. America: The Good Neighbor. Widespread but only partial news coverage was given recently to a remarkable editorial broadcast from Toronto by Gordon Sinclair, a Canadian television commentator. What follows is the full text of his trenchant remarks as printed in the Congressional Record: "This Canadian thinks it is time to speak up for the Americans as the most generous and possibly the least appreciated people on all the earth. Germany, Japan and, to a lesser extent, Britain and Italy were lifted ...

Just heard this on ABC radio, from earlier today. England is 5 hours ahead of the east coast I think.

Always, all our wars were somewhere else. The one this time is here. Suddenly Tuesday morning, in the smoke that covered the sun, and in the flames coming in red-orange tongues between the silvery panels of the high floors of the building, that is over a street of people who are looking up at the smoke and fire and sound a loud moan. They look at the building top as they start running away. The windows of the building do not open and the stairwells inside the building have no effect on smoke except to let it rise at ...

Anti-Semitism in the Form of "Rules of WAR for Israel" by STEVEN E. PLAUT MARCH 15, 1998 ONE OF THE most absurd aspects of the anti-Israel campaign is the attempt to delegitimize Israel and justify Arab atrocities on grounds of arguing that Israel must be prohibited from defending itself unless it does so through the most highly-restrictive rules of behavior. If Israel violates any of these special Israel-specific rules of waging defense, the violation would make Israel into the aggressor and criminal, not the Arab perpetrators of atrocities and aggression. These rules come in various forms, down to and including ...

"A nation that continues to make non-violent revolution impossible makes violent revolution inevitable." - Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. &nbsp;As the smoke clears from the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Arlington, it is becoming increasingly apparent to me that the teachings of Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" are timeless. This book tells me, "all warfare is based on deception." And until the general public is willing to realize this simple fact, the true grim reality of the so-called "terrorist attacks against freedom and democracy" on 11 September 2001 will ...

<p>The collapse of the World Trade Center towers registered a 2.0 on the Richter scale -- and sent even stronger shockwaves through the lives of tens of thousands of people.</p> <p>One is Brian Farrell. He and two dozen fellow fightfighers from Brooklyn Ladder 132 raced to the scene of the Twin Towers catastrophe early Tuesday afternoon, hours after the skyscrapers' collapse. Six of them are now missing. "One day you're working alongside these guys and the next they're gone," said Mr. Farrell Wednesday, dazed and covered in soot.</p>

Secrecy of confessional invoked by former priest By Dick Grogan, in Derry A former priest invoked the secrecy of the confessional yesterday when he refused to name people he knew to have been members of the Provisional IRA in 1972. Mr Denis Bradley, who was a Catholic curate in Long Tower parish in Derry at the time of Bloody Sunday, had been pressed by Mr Christopher Clarke QC, counsel to the tribunal, to identify people who were known to him as, or were widely reputed to be, members of the Provisionals at the time. Mr Clarke remarked that, apart ...

<p>In the aftermath of this week's terrorist attacks, civil liberties groups, privacy advocates and scholars are bracing for demands seeking antiterrorist measures that might end up jeopardizing personal privacy and other freedoms.</p> <p>Authorities quickly turned their attention in this latest investigation to the Internet, in addition to their on-scene efforts. Law-enforcement agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, this week demanded information about some subscribers from both AOL Time Warner Inc.'s America Online Inc. and EarthLink Inc., the nation's largest Internet-service providers, people familiar with the matter said. Both providers said they were cooperating with the agencies.</p>

Bin Laden: the former CIA 'client' obsessed with training pilots Special report: Terrorism in the US Giles FodenThursday September 13, 2001The Guardian Stories about him are legion. How he was known as one of the "Gucci muj", the scions of rich Arab families who poured into Afghanistan in the late 1980s to help the rougher-hewn mojahedin fight the Soviets. How, having won his spurs, he led an assault in the siege of Jalalabad and took possession of the "lucky" Kalashnikov which he now carries with him almost everywhere. But perhaps the most interesting facts about America's public enemy number ...