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Terrorism's Western Ally By Dale HurdCBN News Senior Reporter April 21, 2003 U.S. intelligence is still coming to grips with reports that Al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist groups are setting up bases in Venezuela. CBN.com – WASHINGTON, D.C. — While America's attention has been focused on Iraq, it may have a growing terrorist threat in this hemisphere, and in a country you might never expect. On February 13 this year, at London's Gatwick Airport, a Muslim with suspected links to Al Qaeda was arrested after a grenade was found in his luggage. His ticket shows he flew in from...

She joined the FBI after watching the World Trade Center collapse before her eyes, leaving a lucrative job at a hedge fund.As a Special Agent in Miami, she worked on many high-profile cases and won awards and accolades for her hard work and diligence.Last year she resigned in disgust. The FBI had turned its sights from fighting crime to fighting Americans’ freedoms.Former FBI Special Agent Nicole Parker broke down in tears Thursday while testifying during a congressional hearing.Parker said during the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government’s inaugural hearing that she left her job at a hedge...

In the end, even his personal friendship with the President could not help the Professor save his job in New Delhi. Robert Blackwill, the US ambassador to India who announced his resignation today, was left with little choice but to take that return ticket to Harvard because of his constant and increasingly unpleasant run-ins with a US State Department that sought to openly wear its predilection for Pakistan on its sleeve. The last time a genteel exchange of views between India and the US — led, respectively, by foreign secretary Kanwal Sibal and US assistant secretary of state for South...

A closed-door meeting of left-wing non-governmental organizations (NGOs) was held on January 16, 2003, in Washington, D.C. to consider how to apply international financial pressure through a global tax on the U.S. Bruno Jetin, a representative of ATTAC France, spoke to the gathering and acknowledged in private conversation that his group works hand-in-glove with the French Communist Party and the "Socialist parties on the Left." A representative of the embassy of France in the U.S. was listed as a participant. ATTAC stands for the Association for the Taxation of Financial Transactions for the Aid of Citizens. The International ATTAC Movement...

Iran initiated 9/11 attacks’ 22 January 2004 HAMBURG – The Iranian intelligence service was the initiator of the 11 September 2001 suicide-jet attacks on New York and Washington, according to a defector quoted Thursday by German police at the Hamburg terrorist trial.One Federal Crime Office interrogator said he had taken down a statement in Berlin on Monday from a former Iranian agent who insisted that Iran had employed Saudi radical Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network to carry out the attacks. The defector could not appear himself in court because he had been promised anonymity, two police officers told the trial...

A former Russian intelligence officer has been sentenced to 18 years' hard labour for treason and espionage. Colonel Alexander Zaporozhsky, 52, was found guilty of passing information about Russian overseas intelligence activities to foreign governments for five years. He was also suspected of revealing the identities of more than 20 Russian US-based spies. Since his retirement in 1997, Mr Zaporozhsky had been working for an American company in the state of Maryland, but he was arrested in Moscow in 2001. The court gave Mr Zaporozhsky a tougher sentence than the 16 years demanded by prosecutors. 'Secrets to CIA' He was...

It was a father's dilemma: What to do with a wayward son? In Saddam Hussein's case, the problem was his son Odai, who has been accused of murders and rapes too numerous to count.

<p>OSLO, Norway (AP) — The Nobel Peace Prize Committee has received 150 nominations for the 2003 award, with a majority of nominations coming from North America, committee secretary Geir Lundestad said Tuesday.</p> <p>Nominations, which had to be postmarked by Feb. 1, are made by past laureates, committee members, university professors and select organizations. They're kept secret for 50 years, although those making them often announce their choice.</p>

<p>JOHANNESBURG - In 1963, lawyer George Bizos saved anti-apartheid icon Nelson Mandela from the gallows, and Mr. Mandela went on to become president of South Africa. Forty years later, he is defending Zimbabwe opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai on a capital charge of plotting to kill President Robert Mugabe.</p>

A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life. "I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life." Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program,...

The Moscow Military District Court has ruled that it was Colonel Aleksander Zaporozhsky who gave up Robert Hanssen to the CIA. The court ended up giving the former intelligence officer an even stiffer sentence than the prosecutor had demanded. On Wednesday the former Colonel of the Foreign Intelligence Service Aleksander Zaporozhsky was found guilty of high treason in the form of revealing state secrets to the USA. Zaporozhsky was sentenced to 18 years in a high security labour camp and stripped of his military rank and all state decorations, though his property will not be confiscated. During his service, Zaporozhsky...

Bad morning for Pelosi @ 9:53 am by Eric Zimmermann Two new developments in the "what did Pelosi know about waterboarding" series spell trouble for the Speaker. First, CNN reports that an aide told Pelosi in February 2003 that waterboarding had been used on Abu Zubaydah. This contradicts Pelosi's assertion that she only knew about the legal rationale for waterboarding, not that it had been used. Sheehy attended a briefing in which waterboarding was discussed in February 2003, with Rep. Jane Harman, D-California, who took over Pelosi's spot as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee. This source says...

JERUSALEM -- The U.N. agency that provides food for Palestinian refugees warns it will have to stop emergency aid next month unless it receives $94 million. The chronically cash-strapped United Nations Relief Works Agency, or UNRWA, said in a statement that it needs the money to continue its assistance after late March. "We are scraping the bottom of every barrel and stretching every dollar we have, but without immediate donations our emergency operations are going to grind to a halt," said agency director, Peter Hansen.

Nigergate: The shadow of the French inspector After yesterday’s posting, a close look at Ambassador Wilson, today’s the turn of Mr Jacques Baute. The following article raises some incredible questions and reveals some amazing facts. Mr Baute, a Frenchman, seemed to know all about the the Niger forgeries and kept very quiet about them. The result: the Bush administration was ridiculed. The day after Baute’s organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared the documents to be forgeries the French Government made a startling announcement..... The Bush administration was decieved by it’s presumed allies and the blame was placed on the...

Nizar Najoef, a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “Di Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq’s WMD are kept. The storage places are: 1. Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral part of an underground factory, built by the North Koreans, for producing Syrian Scud missiles. Iraqi chemical weapons and long-range missiles are stored in these tunnels. 2. The village of...

Confusion surrounded the recent whereabouts of the right-hand man of Saddam Hussein's oldest son Uday after Iraqi exile groups claimed he had defected last week after disappearing from a hotel in Beirut. The reports circulated for several days before Adeeb Shabaan emerged in Damascus last night and insisted that he was in Syria on an unspecified work trip and had not defected. Mr Shaaban, 47, is officially head of the Iraqi Photographic Association and a Baghdad newspaper editor, but in practice he has for the past five years run Uday's private office and acted as his press officer. He is...

WASHINGTON - When war ends in Iraq, the Bush administration will give "extremely high priority" to halting a secret nuclear weapons program in neighboring Iran, a senior administration official said Monday. John Bolton, the under secretary for arms control, joined National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in warning that the White House sees nuclear weapons programs in Iran and North Korea as imminent threats. "The estimate we have of how close the Iranians are to production of nuclear weapons grows closer each day," said Bolton, a leading hawk within the administration. Both Bolton and Rice, in separate speeches to the...

ROME (AP) - An Italian prosecutor is investigating whether U.S. agents played a role in the alleged abduction from Milan of a suspected Islamic militant, according to news reports. The 41-year-old imam, identified as Abu Omar, disappeared in the northern Italian city in February 2003. Milan Prosecutor Armando Spataro is looking at whether he was seized in a CIA operation and flown to Egypt for interrogation, the Corriere della Sera and other newspapers have reported. Last week, the prosecutor visited a joint U.S.-Italian air base in Aviano to find documents on air and vehicle traffic that might shed light on...

A source close to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi now confirms that Pelosi was told in February 2003 by her intelligence aide, Michael Sheehy, that waterboarding was actually used on CIA detainee Abu Zubaydah. ... This appears to contradict Pelosi's account that she was never told waterboarding actually happened, only that the administration was considering using it.... Some Republicans have called for Pelosi to testify at congressional hearings. The number two House Democrat -- Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland -- said Tuesday, "I think the facts need to get out" regarding what members of Congress had been told about harsh interrogations....

GENEVA (AP) - Switzerland approved on Friday the handover of bank documents to the United States on the source of a donation to a U.S.-based Islamic charity suspected of money laundering and recruiting terrorists over the Internet. The supreme court's decision allows Swiss authorities to override banking secrecy and provide documents, including those for a $300,000 transfer made May 14, 1998, from a Geneva bank to the Michigan-based Islamic Assembly of North America. The decision was in response to a February 2003 U.S. government request for judicial assistance in its investigation of the assembly and its Idaho-based Saudi computer expert...