James Berkland-- a retired USGS geologist from Santa Clara County, California-- claims to be able to predict earthquakes with greater than 75% accuracy rate simply by counting the number of lost pet ads in the daily newspaper, and correlating this relationship to lunar-tide cycles.
Researchers have developed technology that can project a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it. Inventors of the new "ventriloquist" technology say it could provide an added dimension to entertainment. The military, however, is investigating using it to confuse opponents or even inflict pain.
Takfiri and the Salafist Groups offered men linked to Bin Laden a way to justify attacks on West.
A matrix of terrorist cells - allied to bin Laden but often more extreme than him - planned mayhem across the continent from bases in Britain, Spain, Germany and France. Only now are the links between these shadowy groups coming to light as intelligence services realise that, unknown to them, the battle had started long before 11 September
Reason: May pose a serious burn hazard.
(by Dennis R. MacDonald; Yale University, 2000 (infidels.org)
MacDonald's shocking thesis is that the Gospel of Mark is a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek "Bible" of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense "updates" and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus
Locals are skeptical, but author Stephen King, a Durham native, didn’t seem surprised by the rumor. King toiled in the mill for a time as a young man.
“If ever there was a place to stick aliens, Worumbo Mill was it,” the author said through his assistant.
Just a week before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research announced that it was negotiating with a Washington contractor, Advanced Power Technologies Inc., to enhance the system and bring it to full power. HAARP has been running at about one-quarter of its planned power. (MSNBC)
Sun Feb 24,10:05 PM ET
ROME (Reuters) - Italian police have discovered a hole recently carved into an underground passageway next to the U.S. embassy and suspect terrorists were planning to plant a chemical bomb there, a judicial source said on Sunday.
February 21 2002
Click here for martyrdom. Volunteers are invited by Ansar-e-Hizbollah, Iran's radical Islamic shock-troops, to register by internet for worldwide suicide attacks in the event of a US military strike.
The new website, www.ansaronline.com, advises that Hizbollah forces would respond to any incidents or attacks against Iran "by striking relentlessly against US and Israeli interests, soldiers and officials all over the world".
There is nothing in the Koran, the book of basic Islamic teachings, that permits or sanctions honor killings. However, the view of women as property with no rights of their own is deeply rooted in Islamic culture, Tahira Shahid Khan, a professor specializing in women's issues at the Aga Khan University in Pakistan, wrote in Chained to Custom, a review of honor killings published in 1999.
(The Independent - London)
2-24-2
High-profile Western campaigners who spent millions of dollars buying the freedom of slaves in war-torn Sudan have been the victims of a scam, it is alleged.
Anti-slavery organisations have "redeemed" more than 65,000 Sudanese slaves from their Arab masters over the past seven years, usually for $50 (£35) a head. The leading charities are the Swiss-based Christian Solidarity International (CSI) and Christian Solidarity Worldwide (CSW), founded by Baroness Caroline Cox, a deputy speaker of the Lords. But although slavery in the African country is a reality, The Independent on Sunday can reveal that "redemption" has often been a carefully orchestrated fraud on the charities.
According to witnesses, local villagers are rounded up to pose as slaves when Christian groups arrive with briefcases full of money. The "slave traders" are sometimes disguised rebel soldiers from the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). A retired Italian missionary told the IoS he saw his own parishioners posing as slaves. A European aid worker saw children she knew pretending they were in bondage. And a former rebel commander said a relative, also a soldier, had been forced to pose as a slave trader.
The emotive issue of slavery in Sudan has had a particularly strong impact among black Americans and Christian groups in the US, where it has become the biggest African cause since apartheid. Politicians have chained themselves to railings in protest, pop stars have given free concerts. The CSI has raised millions of dollars with its promise to save a slave for $50, and raised the issue in public consciousness by inviting well-known figures such as the Rev Al Sharpton and Perry Farrell, lead singer of the rock group Jane's Addiction, to witness redemptions.
Last May, a 12-year-old American schoolgirl, Laquisha Gerald, raised $44 for the cause. "I thought it was good to give up my lunch money to free slaves," she told the Philadelphia Inquirer. "We're doing something good."
Baroness Cox, who split from CSI to form CSW in 1997, has spent over £100,000 redeeming 2,281 slaves. She insists she was not cheated. "We double and triple-checked and did spot interviews with the people redeemed," she said. "Their stories rang true." The decision of her charity, CSW, to stop redeeming slaves a year ago had nothing to do with suspicions of corruption, she said. According to the organisation, her missions to Sudan simply became too dangerous.
Some genuine slaves have been set free - nobody can say how many - but frequently redemption is a deceit, stage-managed by corrupt officials of the Sudan People's Liberation Army (SPLA). "The racket comes right from the top," said Samson Kwaje, an SPLA official, last week. "The money comes from those American kids. But who gets the cheque?"
The Khartoum government, which has been fighting southern SPLA rebels since 1983, is a notorious human rights abuser. The rebels have mainly traditional and Christian beliefs, while the government is dominated by Muslim extremists. Last week a government helicopter gunship fired five rockets into a southern village, killing 17 civilians in an attack which prompted the US to break off a peace initiative it is sponsoring.
Nor is there any doubt that the government has deliberately rekindled the slave trade as a counter-insurgency measure. It has armed the Murahaleen, a murderous Arab militia that destabilises rebel-held villages by killing the men, stealing the cattle and taking women and children into bondage. In the north, the slaves endure a terrible life of harsh labour, physical abuse and sometimes forced Islamisation or female circumcision.
Swiss-based CSI has sought to counter this terrible trade since 1995 by buying the freedom of more than 63,000 "slaves". In theory, it arranges for Arab middlemen to buy up the slaves and secretly walk them across the front line to the safety of the rebel-held south. Then the CSI representative flies in, pays the going rate - usually $50 per head but currently $35 - and the slaves walk free.
Or so it seems. Father Mario Riva, an Italian missionary, witnessed a CSI redemption in the late 1990s. Unlike nearly all other Westerners who have been permitted to witness a redemption, he knew the Dinka people and their language. Fr Riva saw John Eibner, an American CSI official and the driving force behind slave redemption, standing under a tree with some slaves. The priest recognised them as his own parishioners. "The people told me they had been collected to get money," he said. "It was a kind of business."
Interpretation was key to the deception, said Fr Riva. If Mr Eibner asked whether a slave had been taken into captivity, the interpreter would ask if they had suffered in the war. If the "slave" answered that they had, Mr Eibner would be told they had been captured and badly treated by Arabs, and were grateful to be home.
A nurse with a European charity recalled seeing a slave redemption in late 1999 carried out by American Christians. "They brought the kids to be redeemed to a clearing under the trees. I knew two of them by name," she said. Her colleague recognised the "slave trader" as a rebel official, but warned her to keep quiet. "He said: 'There are guys here with guns. Let them give the money if they want,' " she recalled. The nurse requested anonymity, fearing retribution against colleagues.
If the slaves are fake, the money is very real. After the CSI plane takes off, the profits - sometimes over $300,000 in one week - are divided up. A small cut goes to the slaves and the traders, but the lion's share goes to local commanders and SPLA figures. One is said to have earned enough to buy 40 wives, and others have allegedly built houses or financed businesses.
Mr Eibner denies CSI has been duped. "The money involved is publicised, but we have mechanisms to ensure there is no fraud," he said. But the organisation recently announced that it had freed 14,500 slaves without paying a penny.
Experts have long maintained that CSI's figures did not add up. At times when it was "redeeming" over 6,000 people, aid workers in the north saw no mass movements south. Colleagues in the south reported no surge in demand for food aid from the returned "slaves". In 2000, Fr Riva compiled a list of southerners who had returned to Nyamlell, the town where the CSI campaign started, over the preceding seven years. They were only 300.
Redemption has caused upset within the SPLA, where accusations of profiteering have been made against senior figures. "It has divided us," said Mr Kwaje. Aleu Ayieny Aleu, a retired SPLA commander, alleged that a relative had been "forced several times to pretend [to be] an Arab and simulate the sale of free children" to CSI. And a storm of profiteering allegations prompted the SPLA leader, John Garang, to ban five people from entering Sudan on CSI redemptions.
CSI estimates there are still 200,000 slaves in Sudan. Save the Children puts the figure at no more than 7,000.
PARENTS’ groups and teachers last night attacked the introduction of electronic tagging systems in nursery schools across Scotland.
Critics of the new security measures, which have already been installed in six nurseries across the Central Belt, claim they play on the fears of parents and provide no additional safety benefits.
Judith Gillespie, policy development manager with the Scottish Parent Teacher Council, described the Little Cherub system developed by Bo’ness-based Insight (UK) Ltd as a panic measure.
Leslie Beber, from the Scottish Independent Nurseries Association, also attacked the scheme, claiming it was entirely driven by profit.
However, a spokesman for Insight said the system, similar in design to the electronic tags used to prevent shoplifting in retail clothing outlets, brought additional peace of mind to many parents.
Brooks Harvey, a teacher at the council-run Belhaven Nursery in Glasgow, which installed the £90 per month system last year after a fundraising drive by parents, also defended the tags, claiming families had reacted positively: "We have a secure nursery here with locked doors and a camera system, but it was felt that tagging would give us extra peace of mind.
"There is a busy road outside and always concern about other dangers to children in our society. Having a mechanism which allows to know instantly if a pupil has gone through the door gives us and parents a great deal of security. Leaving young children at a nursery is traumatic enough for parents, but if they feel better about doing it because of this system then that is all to the good."
However, Ms Gillespie attacked the scheme saying: "This is playing on the fears of parents and clearly some people are making money out of it.
"Security in nurseries is already very effective and this is a completely unnecessary panic measure which will only serve to increase worry that parents are under. If this sort of thing becomes widespread it shows how little genuine risk assessment is carried out."
Ms Beber added: "What concerns me is where this will all end. Once we start tagging nursery children, will we consider it acceptable to tag primary or secondary pupils? If nursery staff are looking after children properly then this sort of system should never have to be used."
However, Trevor Taylor, a spokesman for Insight, dismissed the comments as scaremongering and said the system had already proved very popular in crèches run by big businesses. "This was developed by us from the security tags used on clothing, originally for use in crèches at companies such as Sainsbury’s supermarket. The fact that it is so effective opened our eyes to the possibilities of using it in nurseries and it has received a very positive reaction so far," he said.
"No-one can be 100 per cent certain they are vigilant at all times, but this system means parents can have peace of mind when they leave their children."
The tagging system works using radio signals which are transmitted between two posts on either side of the entrance which needs to be protected. If a child wearing one of the tags passes between the two posts the radio signal is blocked and an alarm is set off, warning staff that a child has gone through the door.
Mr Taylor added: "We are developing tags which can fit into painting aprons or clothes children would wear in water play areas. Technology has moved on and it is now available and affordable. Why not take advantage of something which improves safety?"
22 February 2002
NEW ZEALAND-A boy aged three left one woman with a fractured skull and another shaken and bruised after hitting them with his toy truck.
The women, who were waiting at a Tauranga pharmacy, endured a 30-minute ordeal as the tiny terror kicked, punched and smashed them with his toy.
Both victims needed hospital treatment after the child was finally subdued.
The pair later approached the toddler's mother, who replied: "Yeah, he does that to people sometimes.
"I don't really know what to do about it."
The mum told the tot to apologise. But he just yelled abuse and ran off.
One of the victims, Trish Mackie, was shocked the kid's mother failed to step in to stop the violence.
"It was horror. We were getting beaten up by a bloody loose-wired toddler while his mother just stood aside and let him do what he was doing."
Mackie suffered scratches and bruises to her arms, chest and shins. The other woman, who doesn't want to be named, was taken to hospital with a hairline skull fracture. She was diagnosed as suffering concussion.
She told Truth: "You wouldn't think a little bastard like that could cause so much horror. I read somewhere that's how terrorists are bred.
"If he can do that at three then think of 30 years from now."
The woman was disgusted that his mum let him continue his tantrum.
"She appeared to be as scared as we were," she said.
Mackie said she'd seen the kid kicking the other shopper in the shins, and then bashing her on the head when she bent down to stop him.
Mackie went to her aid but then the pint-sized hoodlum turned on her, whacking her on the shin with the truck, then hurling it at her face.
Mackie picked up the truck, triggering a frenzy of scratches, kicks and punches from the furious child.
"I was in tears. I couldn't push him away because he was strong. I managed to get up and run out of the shop and put the truck on the footpath."
The mother begged the women not to call the cops and they reluctantly agreed.
Cops said they'd have been unable to charge a three-year-old with assault. But the mother might have been charged with allowing the child to attack the strangers.
The incident had an ironic twist.
Mackie used to live on Palm Island, off Townsville in Queensland, which the Guinness Book of Records lists as the world's most violent place outside a combat zone.
"I lived there for four years and not an inch of my body was touched," she says.
"Yet in peaceful Tauranga I'm attacked by a three-year-old."
Scores of rescue workers and residents living near the World Trade Center site have been stricken with acid reflux disease, MSNBC reports. The condition, also known as gastroesophageal reflux disease or GERD, is caused by stomach acid backing up into the esophagus.
Symptoms include a burning sensation in the chest that could be mistaken for a heart attack or an extreme bout of heartburn. The serious condition is one that affects about a third of the U.S. population at some time in their lives, MSNBC says, quoting statistics from the American College of Gastroenterology.
Other symptoms may include a feeling that food is stuck in the throat, morning hoarseness, a dry cough and bad breath. Not everyone experiences the burning sensation in the chest.
Once diagnosed, the condition can be relieved with changes in lifestyle and diet and by taking over-the-counter medications. Left untreated, GERD can cause serious chest pain and worsen upper respiratory ailments like asthma, which has affected hundreds of workers and residents living near Ground Zero.
Recent samples taken near the site found the most polluted air ever recorded.
A 24-stone Florida man died after sitting on a gun he'd hidden under a seat cushion.
Police say Clinton H Williams' weight pushing on the handgun made it go off at his home in Largo.
He was shot in the thigh and was taken to Bayfront Medical Centre where he later died.
The St Petersburg Times says a bullet severed the 39-year-old's femoral artery, which is the main artery of the thigh.
Detective Joe Coyle said: "The way the gun was situated, the gun just went off underneath. It was just a freak accident."
He says Mr Williams was an apparent fan of guns and had two handguns and six or seven rifles in the apartment.
(Sunday February 24, 2002-The Observer)
Britain was battered by extreme weather yesterday as high winds and blizzards spread southwards, killing one motorist, stranding hundreds, and disrupting rail journeys in the North.
A man was killed and another was injured when their car slid off a slush- covered road and collided with a lamppost on the A19 at Peterlee, Durham.
Snow drifts 20ft deep paralysed Cumbria and parts of Scotland, where police rescued 16 people from their cars after abandoning attempts to clear roads. Even parts of London were whipped by snowstorms yesterday.
While both main rail lines between England and Scotland were reopened, there were limited services between Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, with train operator Virgin running at half its normal capacity.
The Met Office predicted a severe frost last night, followed by rain today.
Around 1,600 homes in Northern Ireland lost power in the storms on Friday.
Looks like they shoulda bit their tongue over all this "Early Spring" talk
02-20-02
CORVALLIS - One of the odd possibilities that could emerge from global warming is that much of Europe, robbed of the ocean current patterns that help keep it warm, could rather abruptly enter a deep freeze and have a climate that more closely resembles Alaska than the modest temperatures it now enjoys.
Researchers from Oregon State University explored this potential phenomenon, and the fluctuations in "thermohaline circulation" that could trigger it, in an analysis to be published Thursday in Nature, a professional journal.
It's by no means certain that climatic changes of this magnitude and speed will come to pass, the scientists say, but even the reasonable possibility that they might are a cause for serious concern.
"To answer difficult questions such as this we depend a lot on our computer models, and in this area different models reach different conclusions," said Peter Clark, an OSU professor of geosciences and one of the world's leading experts on glaciers and prehistoric climate changes.
"What is fairly clear is that if the ocean circulation patterns that now warm much of the North Atlantic were to slow or stop, the consequences could be quite severe," Clark said. "This might also happen much quicker than many people appreciate. At some point the question becomes how much risk do we want to take?"
The big variable in this particular equation, Clark said, is whether changes in global temperature and precipitation patterns might affect a gigantic conveyor belt of warm, less-salty surface water that moves from the tropical Atlantic Ocean until it finally becomes so cold and salty in the far north Atlantic that it sinks, moves south and continues the circulation pattern.
This process, called thermohaline circulation, only happens in two regions of the Earth's polar areas. But it is responsible for much ocean circulation, including the critical currents that help keep parts of North America and Europe far warmer than they would otherwise be, considering the far north latitudes at which they lie - most of Great Britain is at the same latitude as central Canada.
This circulation process, researchers say, is not inevitable. Research suggests it may have fluctuated or even stopped numerous times in Earth's distant past, and that it's especially sensitive to moderate increases in temperature or influxes of fresh water. The same very cold, very salty water that sinks in the far North Atlantic Ocean simply won't sink if it's just a little bit warmer or a little bit less salty. And at various times, it appears these changes have happened not in geologic terms of thousands of years, but rather decades.
"This system does not respond in what we call a linear manner," Clark said. "Once you start putting on the brakes, this circulation pattern could slow down faster and faster and eventually stop altogether."
Research has found that some of the Earth's most rapid climatic shifts --- up to 15 degrees in decades or less --- have in the past occurred during glacial periods, when large ice sheets advanced from the polar regions as far south as New York City, among other places. Some scientists have even theorized that the wild temperature fluctuations of the last ice age may have retarded the evolution and development of humans as a species, as they struggled to cope with rapidly changing conditions.
We are now in an "interglacial" period that, in theory, may have less volatility, but could also be coming to an end.
Global warming will simply delay the inevitable, Clark said, because it actually should be about time for Earth to enter its next ice age. There's a fairly well-defined pattern of about 10,000-year-long interglacial periods followed by 90,000-year-long ice ages, and the current interglacial period is already more than 10,000 years old.
"At this point we just aren't sure what to expect in terms of climatic volatility," Clark said. "But the more we learn about them, it becomes clear that these thermohaline circulation patterns are quite sensitive to temperature and influxes of fresh water, such as you might get with changing precipitation patterns triggered by global warming, not to mention melting ice caps or glaciers."
So the paradox, scientists say, is that the same greenhouse effect that might make the Earth warmer, overall, could have the opposite effect on much of Europe by slowing or shutting down the warm ocean circulation patterns on which it depends.
"Most, but not all, coupled general circulation model projections of the 21st-century climate show a reduction in the strength of the Atlantic overturning circulation with increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases," the researchers said in their report in Nature. "If the warming is strong enough and sustained long enough, a complete collapse cannot be excluded."
This prospect --- the collapse of the thermohaline circulation patterns that dictate its climate --- has raised enough concern, Clark said, that Great Britain recently launched a $40 million research program to analyze this phenomena and its possible implications. And the National Academy of Sciences recently issued a report that made reference to an "inevitable surprise" of "climate changes with startling speed."
At this time, Clark said, some of the best potential to improve the ocean and atmospheric computer models that could help resolve some of these questions about future climate lie in studies of the distant past. Ice cores from Greenland glaciers have been instrumental in this work, he said, providing a look backwards at climatic conditions more than 100,000 years into the past, and work in that area will continue.
James Berkland-- a retired USGS geologist from Santa Clara County, California-- claims to be able to predict earthquakes with greater than 75% accuracy rate simply by counting the number of lost pet ads in the daily newspaper, and correlating this relationship to lunar-tide cycles. This maverick geologist, has been meticulously saving and counting lost pet ads for many years. Berkland says that the number of missing dogs and cats goes up significantly for as long as two weeks prior to an earthquake.
Gravitational variations due to the lunar cycles, he says, create "seismic windows" of greater earthquake probability. When the number of missing pets also suddenly rises, then-- bingo-- a quake is likely to happen. Berkland said he thinks the USGS won't accept unusual animal data because it doesn't jive with their current scientific paradigm and hypotheses, to which, he says, their precious egos are overly attached. (Researchers who attempt earthquake prediction are often lumped into the same category as fortune tellers and scam artists by traditional geologists.) It is not surprising then to hear that Berkland was suspended from his position as Santa Clara county geologist for claiming to predict earthquakes-- such as the 1989 Loma Prieta quake in Northern California, which was preceded by numerous reports of odd animal behavior.
Unusual behavior is difficult to define, and determining if there is a characteristic behavior is not a simple, clear-cut process, although there are some distinct patterns which have emerged. For example, an intense fear that appears to make some animals cry and bark for hours, and others flee in panic has been reported often. Equally characteristic is the apparent opposite effect of wild animals appearing confused, disoriented, and losing their usual fear of people. Some other common observations are that animals appear agitated, excited, nervous, overly aggressive, or seem to be trying to burrow or hide.
Although the majority of accounts pertain to dogs and cats, there are also many stories about other types of animals in the wild, on farms, and in zoos; including horses, cows, deer, goats, possums, rats, chickens, and other birds. The behavior has been reported in many other animal species as well, including fish, reptiles, and even insects. Deep sea fish, for example, have been caught close to the surface of the ocean on numerous occasions around Japan prior to earthquakes (Tributsch, 1982).
Some fish-- catfish in particular-- are reputed to become agitated before earthquakes, and at times have been reported to actually leap out of the water onto dry land. Snakes have been known to leave their underground places of hibernation in the middle of the winter prior to quakes, only to be found frozen on the surface of the snow. Mice are commonly reported to appear dazed before quakes, and allow themselves to easily be captured by hand. Homing pigeons are said to take much longer to navigate to their destination prior to earthquakes. Hens have been reported laying fewer eggs, or no eggs at all, and pigs have been observed aggressively trying to bite one another before earthquakes (Tributsch, 1982).
Bees have been seen evacuating their hive in a panic, minutes before an earthquake, and then not returning until fifteen minutes after the quake ended. Even creatures such as millipedes, leeches, squid, and ants have been reported to exhibit abnormal behavior prior to earthquakes (Miller, 1996).
These strange behaviors generally occur anywhere from moments to weeks in advance of a quake. Most of the people I have spoken with who have witnessed this phenomenon, observed the strange behavior within twenty-four hours of a quake, although some observations occurred more than a week before the quake struck. Berkland has suggested that there are possibly two primary precursory earthquake signals-- one several weeks before, and the other one just moments before the quake. A lot of reports appear to confirm this.
Based upon these factors I am predicting, with 80% confidence:
For the Seismic Window of February 24-March 3, 2002 there will be
(1) 3.5-6.0M quake within 140 miles (2 degrees) of Mt. Diablo, east of S.F. Bay;
(2) 3.5-6.0M quake within 140 miles of Los Angeles (34N; 118W);
(3) 3.0-5.5M quake within 140 miles of Seattle, WA;
(4) major (7+M) earthquake globally, probably within the Pacific Ring of Fire,
where about 80% of strong quakes are located each year.
The official told Reuters the videotape, sent by the radical Islamic gang suspected of kidnapping Pearl to a newspaper worker who handed it to authorities, showed the reporter's severed head in its last frame.
Earlier parts of the brief tape showed Pearl's throat being cut from behind while he was still talking to the camera.
In another sign of the killers' determination, the official said that the day before the videotape was received, three top Pakistan police officers received calls on Pearl's mobile telephone warning them to drop the hunt.
"They told the investigators how many children each one of them have, when they go to school, which mode of transport they use for going to school and returning back home and where their families go shopping," the official said.
"They had very minute and precise information about the activities of their family members."
Mariane Pearl issued a statement today decrying the "act of barbarism" committed by "evil people," while expressing gratitude to well-wishers from around the world. "The messages I have received from the five continents have shown me that a lot of you who don't even know Danny personally have come to understand him as a man," she wrote. "Not a hero, not a spy, but an ordinary man and great journalist who has traveled the world to reveal facts and seek the truth -- a value for him as sacred as freedom itself."
Musharraf's main domestic foes, political parties banned when he seized power in October 1999, seized on the murder to demand a return to democracy and to denounce the president's rule.
(IsraelNationalNews.com-2-21-2)
"Residents of Gush Katif decided to take matters into their own hands," said local Rabbi Yosef Al-Nekaveh yesterday, "and when we were involved in evacuating the bodies of the three murdered Israelis [at the Kisufim attack this past Monday night], they placed pig fat and pigskin on the body of the dead terrorist." He said that a "right-wing kibbutznik" had supplied them with the swinish tissues.
Arab MKs responded with outrage. Ahmed Tibi said, ""This is a pig-like act of a man who is not worthy of being a rabbi," while Abdel Malek Dahamshe added, "The ethical inferiority and lowliness that the settlers have reached is intolerable. This is an act of first-degree desecration of God's name... It is especially shocking to think that a rabbi did this."
On the other side of the spectrum, MK Tzvi Hendel said, "If these primitive murderers stuff their brains with nonsense about Paradise and who-knows-how-many virgins waiting only for them, then they certainly believe in the other nonsense that being buried with pigskin blocks their way to Paradise."
Poll shows disillusionment and disenchantment as Palestinian attacks continue, with suicide bomber foiled in shop.
One thing you can say about the Israelis is if their leader leads them up shit creek they're not slow in throwing them overboard. Shame the rest of the middle east doesn't have this flexibilty.
EXCERPT:Mr. and Mrs Maddison were driving south on the A84 Lochearnhead to Balquhidder road (marked “X” on the maps late one starry night in 1997 when they heard the whistle and chuff of a steam train near the old station at Balquhidder junction. (West Perthshire, Scotland). To the north they could see a line of moving lights which they took to be carriages. When they told Mrs. Maddison’s father about the event, they were astounded to find that the line had been closed over 30 years ago (1965) after a landslide!
EXCERPT#2:Cat Circle
This is interesting and logical, the 30-50 cats sitting in a circle across the road. Cats are known to love places of high electromagnetic energy - they love to sit on lines of unhealthy earth energies (black streams) television sets, computers, and as I well know, the batteries of cars in a garage. So we ask, what was the source of high energies at this road?
Perusal of the Ordnance survey map may supply the answers. This road is on the Highland Boundary Fault Zone. No wonder the cats were having a happy time sitting across the road. Interestingly a friend of mine saw the same thing with cows very close to Arbor Low in Derbyshire some years ago.
Electrical stimulation of certain regions of the temporal lobes produce strange feelings about the actual situation. For a BRIEF period everything seems to be more intense and significant.
Another feeling is that of being out of touch with reality - exactly as described by this couple. Everything looked strange, there were no cars, not even parked. I was sure that something had happened and that we were dead or unconscious, travelling in limbo, so to speak. It was not until we passed the the sign for the trout farm at Comrie that things suddenly became normal, with streets and house lights and parked cars - all as it really should be.
As Professor Peter Nathan describes in "The Nervous System" everything has an unreal atmosphere . . . everything seems to be slowed down . . . even their own movements seem as if they are carried out in slow motion. Everything seems . . . unreal.
External magnetic fields can trigger nerve activity in the brains of some
people. A field only a hundred times stronger than earth background level will do the trick. And as the couple were driving back and forward over faults and thrusts and on the road to Killin and Balquhidder on the way to and from Callander, they were very close to two high transmitting masts.
"The PrayingHands of Mary" is on a ley line in Glen Lyon. Behind this split stone lies the stone circle of Fortingall, and beyond, Croftmoraig stone circle in Loch Tayside.
Researchers have developed technology that can project a beam of sound so narrow that only one person can hear it. "Directed" audio sounds like it's coming from right in front of you even when transmitted from a few hundred meters away.
Inventors of the new "ventriloquist" technology say it could provide an added dimension to entertainment. The military, however, is investigating using it to confuse opponents or even inflict pain.
CINCINNATI -- Some sort of UFO outbreak apparently occurred on February 18, 2002, as per Newsradio 700 WLW in Cincinnati according to Louise A. Lowry. Callers to the station reported something near Blanchester, and other callers said that something was seen over Zanesville, Ohio. I took an excited phone call from Bill Jones of Ohio MUFON informing me of the action tonight, he said that at some place in Ohio that Interstate 75 was "closed" due to traffic stopping to observe a UFO. Jones informed that 2 people with OHIO MUFON had also observed something that they couldn't explain. Sightings also were reported from Atlanta. It could have been some sort of mass-sighting of a fireball meteor. But the reports and times seem varied and from what I've heard this is describing a hovering object with multicolored lights. BILL BOSHEARS of the SCI-ZONE, took calls from a witness near Fairfield, Ohio (Butler County) who reported seeing a UFO to the east of his location at around 10:30 p.m. He said the object was visible for 30-minutes before it moved due east towards Dayton. The caller speculated Wright Patterson AFB involvement as per the object heading toward Dayton. Motorist heading east on 125 near Amelia, Ohio around 10:00 p.m. observed colored lights in a straight line, describing its sequence as blue, red, blue, red, blue, etc. This caller also saw something else around 10:12 p.m. traveling near Eastgate (Clermont County). Bill Boshears and his co-host, from their vantage point in Mt. Adams (near Downtown, Cincinnati), said that they stepped to the window and saw an object with 3-lights rapidly fly through the sky. Both carried on over this object and suggested it was a UFO.
Don Weatherby, database coordinator for MUFON website (WUFOD), called in to the station around 11:20 p.m. to ask the listeners to submit reports to their online database. One caller claimed to have taken 15-pictures and Boshears said he would post them on his website www.scizone.com. Another caller said that he was on Interstate 70 headed eastbound through Richmond, Indiana when he saw an object close to the ground. The caller said, "The object went straight-up then straight back down and made a 'left turn." He said there was a green and red object toward Dayton, and a third one with red and blue lights. There were two more following 'vertical' to each other. Boshears asked if it hovered? The caller said they were moving fast and made a hard left turn. Tim from Dayton said that he saw something with blue and red heading south, and that it could not have been a helicopter. He said it made a sharp angular turn and made the sound of a 'broken-down aircraft.'
Boshears added that the object he saw over downtown Cincinnati made a sharp, angular turn. and the object was 'not a jet aircraft.' Another caller said that at 10:55 p.m. he saw lights coming out of the south from his vantage point near Mason, Ohio, near Interstate 75. This caller said that he saw an object with two white lights and one red light that flashed like a strobe. He also said that there were six objects separately heading north-northwest that seemed to approach Hamilton, Ohio (Butler County). This man claims to be in the army and said he would know a helicopter or plane if that was what this was. He said another object came out of the west and attempted to intercept the first object, which he said was visible for the past 40-minutes. The last object was moving at a high-rate of speed. Mike in Oakley called Boshears and said, he stepped on his porch after hearing the radio program and saw one object head south and then saw a few more seeming to fly around the Oakley area heading east. This caller said the object looked like a standard swept-wing military aircraft. Boshears complained that his 'chatroom' was flooded with people from all over the country reporting UFOs. Boshears has returned after a commercial break, very winded, claiming now to see three objects to the west of Cincinnati that have appeared in perfect alignment, one after another. He is saying this is 'unbelievable' and his co-host also agrees that these are not airplanes. I should inform that from his vantage point in Mt. Adams, air traffic to the Greater Cincinnati Airport will come in from that direction, over Delhi and into northern Kentucky. When I stepped outside moments ago I did not see any air traffic, but for a Sunday night that's not out of the ordinary. (P.S., I notified a contact in Clermont County who advised around 11:15 p.m. of seeing six-planes lined up in that area, routine Airborne Express traffic to Wilmington Airport.
Larry, south of Lexington, Kentucky, called in to report that at the I-75/I-64 split in Lexington he saw an object with a puzzling light pattern that strobed like an ambulance, and two objects heading south. Dave on a cellphone called, said he was headed eastbound on 70 at mile marker 46 says a huge diamond-shaped white light shooting intermittent strobe lights down at the ground. The caller said it was standing still about 300-yards away from him. He said it was stopping traffic on the interstate. Boshears said that truckers across the Midwest are talking about this on CB radios. Boshears had said that WPAFB had told "him" that they had nothing going on. I presume that since he said this, he had called WPAFB or someone in the newsroom had called WPAFB. http://www.ufoxfiles.com/WorldOfTheStrange/default.asp
Sunday September 30, 2001
The Observer
The head of one of the world's most extreme Islamic terrorist groups funded by Osama bin Laden was living in London until September last year, The Observer can reveal.
Djamel Beghal, 35, was a regular at Finsbury Park mosque in north London and lived in Britain for at least three years. He was arrested in Dubai in July and stands accused of plotting a series of European terrorist 'spectaculars' including a plan to fly a helicopter full of explosives into the US embassy in Paris.
Yesterday one of Beghal's commanders, 23-year-old Kamel Daoudi, who was arrested in Leicester last week, was extradited to France. Both were members of Takfir-wal-Hijra (Anathema and Exile) whose members have been described as the 'most dangerous people alive'.
Islamic sources told The Observer that even bin Laden once thought the group 'beyond the pale'.
One Algerian living in London who knew Beghal said: 'Believe me, you do not want these people in your country... they will kill anybody, including their own family, if they are caught smoking or drinking.'
US investigators now believe that the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon were planned in Germany using up to 30 people, with individuals who lived or once lived in Britain playing a crucial role. It has emerged that, hours after the 11 September attacks, German intelligence agents intercepted telephone conversations between followers of Osama bin Laden during which they overheard terrorists refer to 'the 30 people travelling for the operation'.
So what were the other two targets.
Al-Qaeda (The Base)
Osama bin Laden's loose-knit terror organisation led by the Saudi dissident from Afghanistan
Egyptian Islamic Jihad
Extremist organisation led by bin Laden's number two, Ayman Zawahiri, now merged with al-Qaeda
Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya
Specialised in attacks on the Egyptian security services, but now has a worldwide terror network
Takfir-Wal-Hijra (Anthema and Exile)
Algerian group that believes all non-believers, including moderate Muslims, are a legitimate target for terror
Funded by bin Laden, the GIA is committed to the overthrow of the Algerian military regime and anti-French terror
Salafist Group for Call and Combat
Another Algerian faction with cells across Europe which split from the Groupe Islamique Armée in 1998
Islamic Arny of Aden
Responsible for kidnapping Western tourists in Yemen and thought to be connected to British-based cleric Abu Hamza
Jaish-E-Mohamed
Aims to unite Kashmir with Pakistan and has close links with the Taliban
Very effective Pakistani guerrilla organisation fighting against Indian presence in Kashmir
Harakat Mujahideen
Armed group in Kashmir whose leader Farooq Kashmiri has direct links to bin Laden and signed his 1998 fatwa
Palestinian Islamic Jihad
Committed to forming an Islamic state in Palestine and the destruction of Israel
Abu Sayyaf
Very effective splinter group in Philippines involved in kidnapping Western tourists
Mujahideen-E-Khalq
Largest Iranian dissident group, with a philosophy that mixes Islam and Marxism
Takfir wal Hijra and the Salafist Group for Call and Combat offered men linked to Bin Laden a way to justify attacks on West.
(Los Angeles Times/December 22, 2001 )
Paris -- In the dreary suburbs of Paris, they were Algerian immigrants who survived on part-time jobs and petty crime. In Milan, they were Tunisians who stole and forged passports. And on Spain's southeastern coast, they were Algerians who specialized in stealing credit cards.
For these young Muslim men accused by police of plotting terror for Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda network, two obscure Islamic sects seemed to provide an arcane justification for underground lives of crime and terrorism.
Before they were arrested in the weeks following the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States, the men existed in a self-imposed internal exile among the "infidels" of Western Europe. They drew inspiration, police say, from Takfir wal Hijra, a violent strain of fundamentalist Islam from Egypt, and from the Salafist Group for Call and Combat, a group formed in the crucible of Algeria's civil war. Both movements preach a virulent hatred of Christians and Jews, encouraging violence in the name of a "pure" form of Islam practic ed at the inception of the religion in the 7th century. The two clandestine groups provide a theology of terror for Bin Laden's jihad against the West.
Islamic scholars say the groups pervert the teachings of Islam and the prophet Muhammad. But for young, disaffected Muslim immigrants adrift in Western Europe, a religiously sanctioned call to arms can be intoxicating.
Police say Bin Laden's followers in Europe persuade poorly educated young men that it is their religious duty to carry out attacks against the West. A Takfir cell broken up in France and Spain planned to bomb the U.S. Embassy in Paris, police say, and members of a Salafist cell arrested in Italy plotted to attack the U.S. Embassy in Rome.
Followers of Takfir and the Salafists have not been directly linked to the terrorists who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks. However, an investigating magistrate in Spain has said the Spanish Salafists were in contact with another Spanish Al Qaeda cell that allegedly provided logistical support to the hijackers.
Breaking Muslim Rules to Avoid Detection
Police say both groups have been funded and supported by Al Qaeda. An academic who studies the groups says some followers believe that Bin Laden himself gave the Salafist group its name in 1998.
The sects are so extreme that they call on followers to kill fellow Muslims who deviate from their vision of a pure form of Islam. Purification is achieved through self-imposed exile, followed by a vengeful return to a society where all nonbelievers are condemned to death.
Translated as Excommunication and Exile--a name given to the group by Egyptian police and newspapers--Takfir wal Hijra refers to the flight, or hijra, of Muhammad from the corruption of Mecca to the outlying city of Medina in 622. Believers emerge from modern exile to kill nonbelievers and those condemned as kafir, or apostate.
Takfir means to declare someone an apostate.
"They believe society is in a state of ignorance. They believe they must retreat--go into exile--and then return as conquerors," said Mamoun Fandy, an Egyptian-born professor at the National Defense University in Washington.
A central tenet, particularly for converts in Europe, is that believers may deviate from strict Muslim practices in order to blend in and avoid detection while plotting attacks. Followers are allowed to shave their beards, drink alcohol, visit topless bars and commit crimes against Westerners--all under the cloak of subterfuge.
That concept is called taquya, which means to protect oneself by burrowing underground. "It means to make your appearance hide your inner reality," Fandy said.
(The Sept. 11 terrorists were not known to be associated with Takfir, said Muntasir Zayyat, a lawyer in Cairo who has defended Islamic militants. But the hijackers certainly adopted Takfir principles by shaving, dressing in casual Western clothes and frequenting taverns and topless bars.)
"With the Takfir logic, you can justify anything," said Alain Grignard, an Arabic-speaking expert on Islam who is also an anti-terror police commander in Belgium. "Takfir becomes the ultimate justification for committing crime as long as it is committed against an infidel."
Recruiters typically cite their own cryptic misinterpretations of the teachings of Muhammad to persuade poorly educated young Muslims that violence in defense of Islam is not only justified but a sacred duty.
The concept of "defensive jihad," or retaliation for a perceived Western assault on Islam, is paramount. Believers cite the presence of U.S. troops on the soil of Saudi Arabia, where Islam was founded, as well as the U.S.-led wars against Iraq and Afghanistan's Islamic regime, the Taliban.
"Bin Laden certainly believes he is fighting a defensive jihad," said Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammed, a Syrian-born Islamic legal scholar in London who has been accused of raising money and recruiting for Al Qaeda--charges he denies.
"And in the psyche of Muslims, anyone who dies in such a cause--especially against America--will be highly regarded and respected, no matter the civilian casualties."
Takfir arose in Egypt in the late 1960s as an offshoot of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, said Abul Ela Madi, an Islamic activist in Egypt and co-founder of the Wasat political party. The group fled to the Egyptian desert and set up a society in exile, Madi said. Takfir's founder, Shukri Mustafa, was executed by the Egyptian government following the group's kidnapping and murder of a rival cleric in 1977.
Takfir is part of a broader, pan-Islamic movement called Salafism, which advocates a return to the pure form of Islam practiced by Muhammad. Based partly on the concepts of Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia, Salafism refers to salaf, the companions of the prophet. The movement condemns regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria as corrupt and un-Islamic, and thus legitimate targets.
'The Hostility Against the West Is Profound'
The Salafist Group for Call and Combat is one particularly violent splinter group. It was formed in Algeria in 1998 by Hassan Hattab, a former commander of the Armed Islamic Group, known by its French acronym GIA, which massacred thousands of civilians in the 1990s as part of its effort to overthrow the government.
The Salafist Group, which sought to expand jihad beyond the Algerian conflict, received money and support from Bin Laden, according to 1999 court testimony in Algeria by a Hattab lieutenant, who said Bin Laden and Hattab often spoke by satellite phone.
With Bin Laden's support, the Salafist Group merged into Al Qaeda, said Quintan Wiktorowicz, an assistant professor at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., who has lived with and studied Islamic extremist groups.Intelligence services in Europe grew concerned about the spread of Takfir and Salafist groups around 1997, when Islamic militants in Egypt and Algeria agreed to truces with those governments. Many radicals fled to Europe after Arab governments began coordinating anti-terrorism efforts in harsh crackdowns that year, Wiktorowicz said.
Once within the Al Qaeda fold, the Takfir and Salafist groups began to focus on what they perceived as the ultimate power behind corrupt Arab regimes: the United States.
"The hostility against the West is profound, especially against the United States and Israel, mixing denouncement of oppression against Muslims . . . and anti-Christian feelings," said a French police intelligence report that identified 15 mosques in France as centers for Takfir recruiters.
Madi, the Egyptian militant, said Takfir has been absorbed into Al Qaeda but is still a distinct movement, as is the Salafist Group for Call and Combat.
What unites the groups is a common belief in Islam as a revolutionary weapon to crush the West and its client Arab regimes, Wiktorowicz said. "Bin Laden is certainly a 'Takfiree.' He's decreed that all the Arab countries, especially Saudi Arabia, are run by infidels," he said.
But Takfir has its own rigid code: Commitment must be absolute and everlasting. Believers who have tried to leave the fold have been executed, said Roland Jacquard, a French expert on terrorism who has close ties to intelligence services.
"Once inside Takfir, you cannot go outside again," he said.
This London-based cleric is recruiting dozens of non-Asians to join him in fighting for an Islamic Republic of Great Britain
Terrorism crisis - Observer special
Burhan Wazir
Sunday February 24, 2002
The Observer
Khalid Akhtar sounds like a typical fanatic. Standing outside a community centre in southern England last week, he branded Jews as 'devils' and called for a war on the enemies of Islam.
But Akhtar is different in one crucial respect from most of the extremists who gather at certain mosques around Britain and talk of revolution.
Once known as John, 29-year-old Akhtar is one of a new generation of white converts being recruited into British Islamic organisations with links to al-Qaeda. His home, the suburban town of Ilford on the London-Essex border, has become a flashpoint for extremist activity.
On Friday nights members of al-Muhajiroun, a UK-based militant group, gather in Ilford's Eton Road Community Centre to hear the charismatic spiritual leader, Sheikh Omar Bakri, denounce the West. On average, about 70 young British men - including 20 whites - attend.
Not far away, followers of the rival Hizbut-Tahrir meet at Ilford Library. The group rose to notoriety in 1996 when its leaders managed to attract enough support to book a religious demonstration at Wembley Arena. Their weekly sermon attracts a similar number of whites.
Since 11 September, al-Muhajiroun has proved itself to be the most rebellious section of the British Muslim community. The British shoe bomber Richard Reid, 28, was seen at several al-Muhajiroun meetings in Ilford in the months before his failed attempt to bomb American Airlines Flight 63 over Miami.
Several al-Muhajiroun members are prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba and in Kandahar after being captured while fighting for the Taliban. Groups like al-Muhajiroun and Hizb ut-Tahrir can count on a following of several thousand in places like Ilford and their founders are expanding the ranks by converting non-Asians to Islam. The borough of Redbridge - which includes Ilford and has 230,000 people - is a fertile recruiting ground.
'Al-Muhajiroun has one goal,' said Anjam Choudry, its UK chairman. 'We would like to see the implementation of the sharia law in the UK. Under our rule this country would be known as the Islamic Republic of Great Britain. To do that, attracting young Asians is not enough. So we are making a conscious effort to recruit large numbers of non-Muslims.
'Whites, Chinese, Japanese and Indians in this country are all bored with the capitalist system. It's a bankrupt ideal. We have found that young non-Muslims, like our Asian followers, want something new. You can tell that from the anti-globalisation movement. So we're offering them something pure: a religious mission, the values of sharia law and jihad.'
'I never felt like I belonged anywhere,' said Mohamed Khan, 24, formerly known as Alan and a white convert in al-Muhajiroun. He said he was disillusioned with Christianity. 'It didn't give me any sense of respect. No one goes to church any more. At least the mosques are full, so Islam obviously has something.'
His friend, Salim Yunus, 20, also a former Christian, said that in al-Muhajiroun they were led by example. 'You look at your average church priest, and what does he do? Who would he go to war with? No one. So how can Christianity claim to be a religion when its followers don't believe in spreading the word? The fact that Western politicians like Bush and Blair are scared of Islam means that it is a great religion. Sheikh Bakri knows that: he would die for it.'
Last week an Islamic cleric in Ilford, Sheikh Abdullah el-Faisal, 38, was arrested in a dawn raid at his home and charged with making race-hate speeches under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861. El-Faisal, whose taped speeches have titles such as 'No Peace With The Jews', appeared at Bow Street magistrates court in London on Thursday. As he left the courtroom, one supporter called out: 'Allah is the final judge.'
The white Muslims don't see themselves as having converted. They think they have reverted to their original faith. Salim Yunus, Mohamed Khan and Khalid Akhtar have their own Islamic role models - Osama bin Laden, Richard Reid and the followers of al-Qaeda.
'There is a clear rise in the politics of identity,' said Paul Weller, Professor of Inter-Religious studies at Derby University. 'Young white men who join Islam might be feeling out of place from modern life. So you find that when they join a religion like Islam they have an unbending view. Their views on jihad, for example, might be less compromising than the views of people who were born Muslims.'
One white convert, Suleyman, a former drug addict from London's East End, said that a holy war was an obligation, not a debatable option. 'Richard Reid tried it and he was right to,' he said. 'Islam has enemies everywhere. It's up to Allah's soldiers to secure a victory.'
(The Associated Press/January 14, 2002)
San Francisco -- John Walker Lindh bumbled his way through his first trip to the Middle East, unwittingly insulting other Muslims and repeatedly getting into trouble with authorities, say those who encountered the California teen-ager in Yemen.
Ultimately, he came to feel that the brand of Islam he encountered in Yemen's capital was not fervent enough - he even objected to having women in his classes, according to students and administrators at the school where he studied Arabic.
Lindh, the 20-year-old American who was captured in November fighting with the Taliban in Afghanistan, traveled alone to Yemen at 17 in the summer of 1998. A recent Muslim convert, he stepped off the plane full of zeal.
He donned white robes and sandals, wore a full beard, and even pretended to speak broken English with an Arabic accent before abandoning the school where his parents had paid thousands of dollars for a year's stay.
Lindh instead sought more fundamentalist teachings in the country's dangerous northern mountains, but was repeatedly turned back by Yemen's military, said Steven Hyland, who taught English and studied Arabic at the Yemen Language Center.
"This is an individual whose idealism led to ideology and he lost all ability for pragmatic thought,'' Hyland said by telephone from Texas.
It was not the first time he embarrassed the school, situated in the capital of San'a.
That came the morning after his arrival, after he exchanged several hundred dollars - a substantial sum in a country where the average civil servant earns about $75 a month. On his way back from the money market, Lindh saw beggars and decided to pay alms to the poor, one of the five pillars of Islam.
"When you give money to beggars in the street, you give them about 10 rials,'' Hyland said. "He starts passing out 200 rial notes, which is way, way, way too much.''
Lindh was mobbed. A woman who worked at the school had to break up the crowd to protect the young American.
"John is in the middle of this whirlwind of people,'' Hyland recalled. "He's much taller than the average Yemeni, with a fist full of cash just raised in the air with his left hand and with his right hand just duking the Yemenis away.''
After that incident, Lindh told other students he was disenchanted with aspects of Yemeni culture and began skipping classes at the school, where about 15 language teachers instruct four or five students each in several elegant buildings near the city's center.
"From that point on, Yemenis weren't Muslims and that was the argument that he tried to make,'' Hyland said.
Josh Mortensen, another student, said from Cairo that Lindh asked peers to call him Suleiman, affected a "bogus'' Arabic accent and wore traditional Muslim garb unlike that of most Yemenis. Other foreign students at the school mockingly nicknamed him "Yusuf Islam,'' the name pop singer Cat Stevens took when he became a Muslim and rejected his music career.
"That whole convert thing just doesn't compute for lifelong Muslims. It's almost like they're being made fun of in a way,'' Mortensen said. "He was so clueless and so rigid, and it was almost patronizing. He adopts all these ridiculous stereotypes.''
Lindh slipped up again by approaching another student, Rizwan Mawani, who happens to be a Shia Muslim, and asking for directions to a Sunni mosque. Lindh was adamant about not wanting to pray with Shiites, who are part of the other main branch of Islam.
"I wasn't insulted. I found it quite humorous,'' Mawani recalled in a telephone interview from London. In Yemen, Mawani said, Shia and Sunni Muslims typically pray side by side.
Lindh was frustrated when he saw some Yemeni Muslims ignoring the calls to prayer, students said. He was particularly bothered when Mawani told Lindh he was more interested in taking a nap, Mawani recalled.
Mawani said Lindh considered himself a Salafi, part of a movement whose members believe they are promulgating the true Islamic faith as taught by the prophet Muhammad in seventh-century Arabia.
"Yemenis speak one of the purist forms of Arabic, but it's not a fanatical country,'' said Barbara Bodine, U.S. ambassador at the time. "Somebody looking for that fire-and-brimstone approach would get to Yemen and be very unhappy. It's simply not there.''
The language center's owner, Sabri Saleem, said Lindh disappeared after complaining that his classes included women and that the secular school did not offer the Islamic studies he craved.
Lindh's goal, other students said, was to reach the mountains of northern Yemen, a risky venture for an American teen-ager. Militants there have kidnapped or killed numerous Western tourists.
"John was problematic for the center because he kept trying to steal away to the northern part of the country because there was an Islamic theologian there that he wanted to study under,'' Hyland said.
Saleem, interviewed by telephone recently while visiting the United States, said Lindh did not surface until police caught him at the airport months later. He had overstayed his visa and failed to get an exit visa.
Lindh came home to Marin County, north of San Francisco, in the spring of 1999. Eight months later, he returned to Yemen, then went to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, where he fought with the Taliban. Now he is being held by the U.S. military as the Bush administration decides how to deal with him.
Lindh's parents referred all questions to their lawyer, James Brosnahan. His spokeswoman had no comment on Lindh's stay in Yemen.
Islamic experts said that in his naivete, Lindh, a baptized Roman Catholic who converted to Islam at 16, fell into a trap so common that Muhammad himself predicted it.
"A person who might have been living a typical happy-go-lucky life and then he really gets very much attracted to the teaching of Islam and its ideal, but then he wants to change overnight - that's what the prophet actually was teaching against,'' said Jamal Badawi of the Islamic Information Foundation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. "He said, `Go gently.'''
Or walk softly and carry a big stick.
Sunday February 24, 2002
The Observer
A senior al-Qaeda leader arrested by police in France has told his interrogators that he saw 'hundreds' of British recruits during four years as a trainer in Osama bin Laden's camps in eastern Afghanistan.
Yacine Aknouche, a 27-year-old Algerian detained in Paris two weeks ago, is said to be 'singing like a canary' after seeing a dossier containing detailed surveillance of his movements in the past three years.
According to police sources, Aknouche was a key figure in organising al-Qaeda cells in France and Germany and has confessed to having met both Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called '20th hijacker' and Richard Reid, the 'shoe-bomber', while in Afghanistan 18 months ago.
One Middle Eastern intelligence service told The Observer that Aknouche had lived in Britain for several months before moving to France. He had entered the UK on a false passport after being arrested on suspicion of credit card fraud in Germany, the source said.
British police sources have confirmed that they are working to establish Aknouche's movements in the UK.
However, the French authorities have yet to make Aknouche available to British investigators for questioning. According to French government sources, almost all judicial co-operation on terrorism between the UK and France has stopped, even though relations between the two intelligence services are good.
A long-standing quarrel over British tolerance for Islamic militants wanted by Paris has flared over the treatment of Abu Qatada, the British-based cleric known to have strong links to Algerian terrorist groups operating in France. They are furious that Abu Qatada - who was top of a British list of terrorist suspects to be interned under new legislation in December - was allowed to 'disappear'.
Some French officials have gone so far as to brief newspapers that Qatada was allowed to escape internment because he was an 'MI5 agent'. They also allege that Britain was a 'revolving door' for Islamic militants because of lax asylum policies.
Aknouche, a former student of chemistry, is also believed to have worked with Abu Doha, who allegedly arranged the flight training for the 11 September hijackers from west London. Aknouche has named Doha, who denies all charges, as bin Laden's UK 'recruiter'.
Aknouche may also be able to clear the London-based Egyptian Islamist Yasser al-Sirri, who is in custody accused of aiding the murderers of the anti-Taliban warlord Ahmed Shah Massoud on the eve of the terrorist attacks.
Aknouche has said he met bin Laden several times and knows Abu Zubaydah, the shadowy Palestinian who was in charge of al-Qaeda's training camps and who is now thought to be running the group's operations.
British investigators are also probing claims a Kent-based company that may unwittingly have been drawn into the al-Qaeda network.
The Aircraft Registration Bureau of Whitstable has been named in a UN report as having supplied a Dubai-based private airline with registration documents for several planes. The airline - called Air Cess - is run by a former KGB officer called Victor Bout, who is alleged to have flown weapons and supplies to the Taliban and to Bin Laden's forces.
On one matter, however, European investigators are clear: there is something truly ruthless about the suspected terrorists they are finding. After six Algerians were picked up in Spain in September, police found videotapes in the apartment of one of the men. One tape showed four Algerian soldiers, with their throats cut, dying in a burning jeep.
For experts in terrorism, such incidents are suggestive. In Egypt in the 1960s, the Islamic ideology Takfir wal Hijra began to win adherents among extremist groups. One of them, the Society of Muslims, was led by Shukri Mustafa, an agricultural engineer. Mustafa denounced other Muslims as unbelievers and preached a "withdrawal" into a purity of the kind practiced by the Prophet Muhammad when he withdrew from Mecca to Medina. The ideology is particularly dangerous because it provides a religious justification for slaughtering not just unbelievers but also those who think of themselves as Muslim. Intensely undemocratic—for to accept the authority of anyone but God would be a blasphemy—Takfir wal Hijra is a sort of Islamic fascism.
European analysts now believe that Takfir thinking has won converts among terrorist groups. Beghal is Takfiri, and Daoudi is thought to be. Roland Jacquard, one of the world's leading scholars on Islamic terrorism, says flatly, "Atta was Takfiri." It is not just soldiers of al-Qaeda who may be following the Takfir line. Mustafa was executed in 1978, but his ideas lived on; the beliefs of al-Zawahiri's Al Jihad were dominated by Takfiri themes. Azzam Tamimi, director of the Institute of Islamic Political Thought in London, says of Zawahiri, "He is their ideologue now ... His ideas negate the existence of common ground with others."
Bin Laden and al-Qaeda may have learned, by violent experience, to pre-empt and harness the new fanaticism. In late 1995, bin Laden's compound in Khartoum was attacked by gunmen believed to be Takfiri. A Sudanese friend of bin Laden's who questioned the surviving attacker said, "He was like a maniac, more or less like the students in the U.S.A. who shoot other students. They don't have very clear objectives." By the time al-Qaeda had resettled in Afghanistan, ideological training was an integral part of the curriculum, according to a former recruit who went on to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi. Students were asked to learn all about demolition, artillery and light-weapon use, but they were also expected to be familiar with the fatwas of al-Qaeda, including those that called for violence against Muslim rulers who contradicted Islam—a basic Takfiri tenet. French terrorism expert Jacquard describes Takfiri indoctrination this way: "Takfir is like a sect: once you're in, you never get out. The Takfir rely on brainwashing and an extreme regime of discipline to weed out the weak links and ensure loyalty and obedience from those taken as members."
The results of the boot camps are die-hard but undetectable soldiers of the movement. "The Takfir," says Jacquard, "are the hard core of the hard core: they are the ones who will be called upon to organize and execute the really big attacks." French officials think that Takfiri beliefs have bred a distinct form of terrorism. "The goal of Takfir," says one, "is to blend into corrupt societies in order to plot attacks against them better. Members live together, will drink alcohol, eat during Ramadan, become smart dressers and ladies' men to show just how integrated they are."
For law-enforcement officials, the Takfiri connection is terrible news. By assimilating into host societies—some won't even worship with other Muslims—it's easy for Takfiris to escape detection. Those stories of the Sept. 11 hijackers drinking in bars and carousing in Las Vegas may now have an explanation.
"The facts remain the same." Globalization will continue to spin people around the world. The U.S. will continue to have two enormous land borders with peaceful neighbors; we're never going to see watch towers along the 49th parallel. Each year, says Newland, there are 489 million border crossings into the U.S., involving 127 million passenger vehicles; each year, 820,000 planes and 250,000 ships enter U.S. airspace or waters. However terrorism is beaten, it won't be by American border controls.
Will it be by war? In the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, there was a hope that police work might be able to rid the world of al-Qaeda and its associates. But the more we know of bin Laden's group, the less that seems likely, and not just because its operatives are ruthlessly fanatic.
Perhaps the single most important truth learned in seven weeks is the existence of a creepy camaraderie, an international bond among terrorists. Those ties are forged in Afghanistan.
Richard Reid certainly seems to have had friends in strange places. In January the Wall Street Journal published an astonishing tale. Journal reporters in Kabul purchased a secondhand computer whose hard drive contained thousands of files written by al-Qaeda members. One file was a detailed account of the travels last summer of "Abdul Ra'uff," who flew from the Netherlands to Israel, Egypt and Turkey scouting locations for terrorist attacks. Abdul Ra'uff's itinerary matched one known to have been taken at the same time by Reid. FBI analysts now firmly believe that Reid and Ra'uff are the same man. Moreover, in the past two weeks, European investigators have linked Reid to some of the best-known terrorist cells on the continent.
The story of Richard Reid, however, is about more than one failed terrorist attempt. An investigation of Reid's case by Time has underlined a truth that experts on terrorism know very well, even if you rarely hear it mentioned by officials in the Bush Administration. As the fighting in Afghanistan winds down, the Administration seems ready to prosecute the war against terrorism and its state supporters elsewhere—in the Philippines, Somalia or even Iraq. But the heartland of Islamic extremist terrorism is now western Europe, where U.S. military power has less to offer by way of a solution. That's why understanding Richard Reid's world is so important.
Zacarias Moussaoui, a Frenchman who was detained in Minnesota last August and later charged with complicity in the Sept. 11 attacks, worshipped in Brixton while studying in London. Moussaoui is remembered in the mosque as a committed hard-liner.
The precise nature of the relationship between Moussaoui and Reid is unclear. They certainly overlapped at Brixton, but Reid, after spending a while there, moved to the Finsbury Park mosque in north London, notorious for the radicalism of its message and the number of suspected terrorists who have worshipped there. Moussaoui was a regular at Finsbury Park, as were other al-Qaeda operatives, such as Djamel Beghal and probably Kamel Daoudi, two Frenchmen currently being held for their alleged role in a plot to blow up the American embassy in Paris. Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian former professional soccer player now being held in Belgium, who is alleged to have been the designated suicide bomber in the Paris-embassy plot, is also thought to have frequented the mosque.
Finsbury Park is at the heart of the extremist Islamic culture that French authorities call "Londonistan." So are the prayer meetings held by Abu Qatada, a fiery Palestinian cleric originally from Jordan. Britain's Muslims aren't necessarily more radicalized than those in communities elsewhere in Europe, but extremists among them may have greater liberty to operate. The British have no system of national identity cards. And the police have traditionally adopted a policy of "watchful tolerance" of extremists, aimed at keeping them aboveground. From afar, that policy can look lax. Watchful tolerance makes sense only if someone is actually watching. Abu Qatada, who has been named in American court testimony as a member of al-Qaeda's fatwa committee, disappeared from his home in west London around Christmas, just before he could have been detained under new antiterrorist legislation.
The mosque in Finsbury Park epitomizes the British attitude. It is the sort of place where you can buy stomach-turning videos (lots of throat slitting) made by Islamic extremist groups. The sermons of Abu Hamza al-Masri, the mosque's one-eyed, steel-clawed imam, continually stress the importance of jihad. Baker says the mosque is dominated by adherents of Takfir wal Hijra, the neo-fascist Islamic ideology influential among European operatives of al-Qaeda. However extreme its message, Finsbury Park is undeniably popular. At midday prayers on a recent Friday, Abu Hamza preached to a congregation of about 1,200, who came from all over London. Sardar explains that the mosque attracts "younger, more disaffected Muslims, mainly from working-class backgrounds, mostly unemployed, unmarried. These guys see themselves as totally under siege. For them, jihad is a salvation." Sardar might have been describing Reid.
When Djamel Beghal was approached by intelligence officers in the departure lounge of Dubai airport two months ago, he looked like any other smart business traveller from the Middle East. Beghal was a devout 36-year-old Algerian who dressed in Western clothes and travelled clean-shaven in order to attract as little attention as possible during his travels between the Muslim world and the West.
s a member of Takfir-wal-Hijra, an extreme and puritanical Islamist organisation financed by Osama bin Laden, he knew he had to keep a low profile, but Beghal was being cautious for a second reason. Returning to Europe from Kabul after a year of training with Abu Zoubeida, named on the FBI's list of most wanted bin Laden lieutenants, he was preparing to participate in a series of pan-European 'spectaculars' on American targets. Beghal - a constant presence at Finsbury Park mosque in London where he recruited for his cause in the late 1990s - was on his way to open the European front of bin Laden's war on the West.
It is a disclosure that has sent a shudder of fear and horror through Europe's intelligence and police: the knowledge that the murderous attacks on New York and Washington which took the lives of almost 7,000, were to be repeated throughout Europe as well.
French investigators now believe Beghal was returning to France to give the go-ahead for a suicide attack on the US embassy in the Place de la Concorde in central Paris, using a lorry or even a helicopter. By last week Beghal - who spent two years in London recruiting for his violent and bizarre organisation of fanatics - was emerging as one of the key British links at the centre of a worldwide conspiracy; the point of contact between bin Laden's group and a wider network of allied Islamist terror groups.
For Beghal, Dubai airport, the busiest in the Middle East, was perfect for his purposes. It allowed him to travel unremarked between Afghanistan and Europe, where he had established cells in several countries including Britain. This was a key transit point from the Far East and South Asia, and Beghal knew it was better to arrive from an Arab country than draw unwanted attention by coming straight from Kabul or Islamabad. As he waited for his flight to be called, he knew his terrorist cells were primed for action as soon as he touched down on European soil.
But Beghal had not counted on the vigilance of staff at passport control, who spotted he was travelling on false French documents. At first, the local intelligence officers who seized him had no idea of the coup they had pulled off. Calls to CIA officers and officers of the French foreign intelligence service - the DGSE, based in Dubai - set alarm bells ringing.
Excited French intelligence officials told them they had been tracking Beghal for almost a decade. He was, they explained, a known activist with Takfir-wal Hijra, which they defined as 'a radical hardline Islamist movement founded in Egypt as a splinter group from the Muslim Brotherhood'.
The story of Beghal and his friends, as it has emerged in the last few days, is the inside story of the secret war of Osama bin Laden and his allies in Europe against America and the West. It is the story of a coalition of nebulous anti-American Islamic fundamentalists. It is also the story of the fanatic who lived to tell his shocked interrogators of the full scope of their plans.
It is all the more compelling for the fact that while others implicated in the attacks and planned attacks have furiously denied their involvement in bin Laden's terrorist campaign, Beghal has described it in its most frightening details.
Beghal's story also tells of a failure of imagination and cooperation among US and European anti-terrorist specialists on a massive scale. If police and intelligence services had all the pieces of the jigsaw - as it has now emerged - they were unable, or unwilling, to make sense of them.
That 'vast picture' was described in graphic detail on Friday by FBI chief Robert Mueller: a terrorist network spanning the globe, a 'picture' that he added 'is nowhere near painted'. Alongside Mueller, Attorney General John Ashcroft significantly widened the frame of that picture beyond bin Laden and his network, saying the investigation 'has not ruled out the involvement of other individuals and other organisations in this attack'. He said the FBI and intelligence services were 'not just looking at the al-Qaeda network' but 'a series of networks all over the world'. Among them - it is now becoming clear - is the network commanded by Beghal.
Beghal's Takfir group has emerged as central to the wider terrorist plan to hit Americans throughout the world. Crucial to that plan were groups and individuals across Britain.
When Beghal left his flat at 112 Boulevard John Kennedy in Corbeil just outside Paris in October 1997, he was heading for London, where he was to emerge as a key figure in recruiting young Muslims for the Jihad - Holy War. He would travel around Britain's mosques and sometimes venture as far as Germany before returning to his London base.
Crucial to the case against Beghal and his associates is the extremity of his beliefs. Translated, Takfir-wal-Hijra means 'Anathema and Exile', adhering to an extreme fundamentalist view of Islam. Unusually for a religion that has historically tolerated Christianity and Judaism, this form of Islam regards even other Muslims who don't share its extreme ideals as 'infidels' who should be punished brutally, sharing an outlook with the Taliban's hardline clerics.
In London, Beghal naturally gravitated to the mosque at Finsbury Park, fast emerging as a magnet for Islamic extremists in Britain - despite the well-established moderate credentials of the mosque's leadership. And even among the extremists, Beghal stood out as one of the most dangerous.
Members of the Algerian community in north London have told The Observer that Beghal was a feared figure around the mosque. 'It is always the ones without beards who are the most dangerous,' said one moderate Algerian who met him. 'Members of this group would kill their own fathers if they caught them smoking or drinking.'
Indeed, one video doing the rounds at London mosques is a Takfir-wal-Hijra 'snuff movie', showing the execution of a member of the organisation judged to have committed a sin.
The group, once thought beyond the pale - even by bin Laden's al-Queda organisation - believes that everyone who does not adhere to their views, including less devout Muslims, should be counted as infidels and were legitimate targets in any Holy War.
One man who knew Beghal during his time in London said: 'This is the most terrifying group of extremists you are ever likely to meet. If you don't agree with them you are an enemy to Islam, and they believe it is legitimate to kill you.'
Beghal's voice, while extreme, was not a lone one among young Muslim extremists on the fringes of Britain's mosques during this key period. Many - including the police and intelligence services - were happy to write off their activities as that of a noisy but harmless group of hotheads playing at being Holy Warriors.
What they did not realise is that Beghal and others like him had long gone beyond talking and joined in an alliance with Islamic fundamentalists' terrorist-in-chief, Osama bin Laden, and his al-Qaeda group.
Evidence of those close links emerged in a Paris court case last week in evidence gathered by the DST, the French counter-terrorist service. One member of the network, Nacer Eddine Mettai, said: 'Bin Laden approved the ties between Takfir and the Algerian GIA (the Armed Islamic Group, responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Algerians). He agreed to finance Takfir as long as it helped him put his own programme into practice.'
Mettai's evidence has proved crucial to the understanding of bin Laden's methodology, revealing how terrorists from different countries and organisations - but all extreme Islamist and hostile to the West - have gathered under a flag of convenience. These are links, both financial and material, that the West's intelligence agencies have simply missed, allowing men like Beghal to operate almost with impunity.
By August of last year, Beghal had dropped off the radar of MI5 and other agencies which had been watching him in Britain, curious to learn more about his activities but lacking sufficient evidence to intervene and arrest him. What they now know is that he left for Pakistan to study with religious scholars before moving on to the training camps in Afghanistan to prepare for his eventual mission.
Though Beghal had disappeared, French intelligence officers keeping watch on his apartment outside Paris, still rented in his name, became curious about a regular visitor to Corbeil. Kamel Daoudi, a 23-year-old French-born computer specialist, shared Beghal's extremist sympathies. When the young man left his own home earlier this month and moved in permanently to Beghal's apartment, French investigators believed they had identified the new leader of a French extremist cell, dubbing him 'Commander of Corbeil'.
What is now clear is that Daoudi was a key player in Beghal's terrorist group. As well as being a computer expert, French intelligence believed he was also Takfir's master bomb-maker, and that he had been given the job of building the explosive device they believe would have demolished the US embassy in Paris and killed hundreds in another spectacular terrorist attack.
Alarmed that a huge atrocity was being planned, the French authorities finally decided to move against Takfir-wal-Hijra on Monday 10 September. They applied to anti-terrorist judges to begin proceedings, little knowing they had barely scratched the surface of a huge conspiracy that, within a day, would see four hijacked US jets attack America.
Within hours of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon alarm bells were ringing, not just at the headquarters of the French intelligence service but among police and intelligence services across Europe, all of which had been tracking similar groups and individuals, and catching hints of similar plots so appalling that they almost beggared belief.
Slowly, an appalling realisation began to dawn: the men they had been following, watching and waiting to make their move, were miles ahead of them. War had been declared by the terrorist months - perhaps years - before. And they hadn't noticed.
Twenty-four hours after the attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, police in Belgium and Holland told the French they could not wait for their byzantine legal system to crank into action before acting against Takfir. They raided addresses linked to Beghal, unravelling a vast network of cells planning a series of attacks on prominent targets later in the year. All of these arrests were made possible because of information supplied by Beghal to French anti-terrorist officials who flew to Dubai last weekend.
Thanks to his evidence, the full scale and scope of what was intended finally began to become clear to police and intelligence agencies across Europe and the US. It consisted of a loose network of groups in Germany, France, Spain and UK, all with the same aim in mind: attacks on US interests across the globe.
Among the planned attacks, police now know, was one on the US consulate in Marseille, and a plot to kill President Bush and other G8 leaders by crashing an airliner into the Genoa summit of industrialised nations. Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak said last week his government provided information to the United States about possible attacks on the Genoa summit by terrorists linked to Osama bin Laden. 'There was a question of an airplane stuffed with explosives,' said Mubarak. 'As a result, precautions were taken. But no one imagined that Boeings full of passengers were going to crash into buildings.'
Last Friday French police finally smashed down the door of Beghal's flat in Paris. But Daoudi, the 'Commander of Corbeil', was not at home. Having been alerted to Beghal's arrest by an article in the French press he had escaped the raid on the flat. When police burst in at 1.30am they found mobile phones and bomb-manufacturing equipment but no Daoudi. The presumed number two of Takfir Wal-Hijra's French operation had fled, along with the simcards and chips for the cell phones used by the organisation.
Daoudi's father, Tahar Daoudi, said last week that his son had lived a peaceful life in Paris's chic fifth arrondissement until, in straitened circumstances, the family of Algerian origin was forced to move out to the suburbs of Paris.
'He was a brilliant boy,' said Tahar Daoudi of his son. 'We arrived in France when he was five years old and in the following year he was brilliant in school. Later he started specialising in computer studies, but finally he decided he didn't want to work any more.
'When we moved he changed all his friends. He was very generous and they got a lot of money out of him - all the money that was supposed to pay for his studies.
'We were furious with him and threw him out of the house. I was furious with him for hanging around with kids who filled his head full of nonsense. I saw him for his civil marriage in 1999, but that was pretty much it.'
Yet this once generous computer whizz-kid was now on the run from international security services, with police closing in on his seven associates. Where would he go? Who could he turn to to offer him a safe haven? It appears there was only one choice - Britain, where a sophisticated Islamist support network operated in every major city.
A mile from the centre of Leicester on the Prospect Hill estate, Muslims in the predominantly Asian community were going about their everyday lives. Some were going to the local mosque in Asfordby Street, others were doing some early morning shopping at the nearby Hill View Stores or getting their children ready for school.
Four days after the Paris raids there was no reason for this quiet Leicester community to expect the events across the Channel were about to have any impact on them.
Just before 8am on Tuesday the sirens of dozens of police cars shattered the morning peace. Armed anti-terrorist officers surrounded the house where Daoudi was sheltering and, as the doors were smashed in with a battering ram, the area was sealed off. Three men were arrested, two from Prospect Hill and one from an upstairs flat in Rolleston Street around the corner.
Scotland Yard would not give any information other than that the arrests have been made in connection with the 'arrest of seven Arab suspects in Paris'.
One of the those arrested was described as an intense, serious man, tall and well-built and very protective of his wife, who always wore a veil.
The next day French television named the individual who had escaped the police raids in France and been caught in Britain. It was Daoudi. In four days, a man alleged to have been an explosives and computer expert for one of the most dangerous terrorist groups in the world had slipped quietly into the UK.
Despite these arrests in Leicester, British police were keen to dampen down fears that the country was a key base for Islamic terrorists. By yesterday Daoudi's run was over. France's most wanted terrorist was back in France, quickly extradited by the UK, and in the custody of the anti-terrorist police the DST.
(Guardian Unlimited)
(By Ananova)
Tony Blair and US President George W Bush are reportedly to hold a summit to finalise military action against Iraq as "phase two" of the war on terrorism.
The Prime Minister is to travel to Washington in April for the talks on what action to take against Saddam Hussein's government, The Observer said.
Downing Street refused to discuss Mr Blair's travel plans but said Britain shared the US' concerns about Iraq's development of weapons of mass destruction.
The British Government will publish evidence of Iraq's nuclear capabilities to quell a Labour backlash over any proposed action, The Observer said.
A Downing Street spokesman said: "We have always made clear that we share the United States' determination to continue the war against terrorism.
"We share their concerns about Baghdad's support for terrorism and its development of weapons of mass destruction.
"The best way forward is through close consultation with our allies, including the United States."
Reason: May pose a serious burn hazard.
(by Dennis R. MacDonald; Yale University, 2000 (infidels.org)
MacDonald's shocking thesis is that the Gospel of Mark is a deliberate and conscious anti-epic, an inversion of the Greek "Bible" of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, which in a sense "updates" and Judaizes the outdated heroic values presented by Homer, in the figure of a new hero, Jesus
AFP [ MONDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2002 7:28:57 AM ]
Locals are skeptical, but author Stephen King, a Durham native, didn’t seem surprised by the rumor. King toiled in the mill for a time as a young man.
“If ever there was a place to stick aliens, Worumbo Mill was it,” the author said through his assistant.
According to articles in the Denver Post, residents of Colorado, and renowned author Stephen King, the columbine killers fantasized about hijacking a plane and crashing it into New York City or the World Trade Towers. Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold spent a year planning their self described "Judgment Day" in Columbine.
Renowned author Stephen King mentioned the uncanny parallel between Columbine and the WTC disaster in the New York Times on Sept. 23, 2001. While discussing American's shock at recent events, Mr. King stated "It wouldn't hurt to remember that the boys who shot up Columbine High School planned to finish their day by hijacking a jetliner and flying it into - yes, that's right - the World Trade Center. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris weren't exactly rocket scientists, and the guys who did this didn't have to be either."
(PatomacNews.com 11-30-01)
I see this has been going on for several months now.
Duchovny Returns for "X-Files" Finale
(E! USA)
The Duchovny-directed episode is slated to air April 28, while The X-Files series finale is scheduled for May 19.
The world got just too strange for the x-files. Cheers to Duchovny/Carter for foregoing ego to give closure.
This is the funniest thing they've done since the Hitler diaries.
The High-Frequency Active Auroral Research Project near Gulkana, known by the acronym HAARP, is the most advanced. Run by the Office of Naval Research and the Air Force’s Phillips Laboratory with help from the University of Alaska, HAARP has been operating for seven years, first under secrecy then more recently in the open. And it has not been without controversy.
Using 72 180-foot antennae set on a 33-acre gravel pad, HAARP heats — some would say it boils — the ionosphere to create a “mirror” so that Extremely Long Frequency/Very Long Frequency radio waves can bounce off and penetrate the Earth. By measuring anomalies in the return signal, the military has had some success in creating “images” of underground facilities, including human-made tunnels and natural cavities. Once identified, tunnel entrances can be more easily spotted by satellites or spy planes, communications from the complexes can be more easily intercepted by antennae in space or on the ground, and underground facilities can be more easily targeted.
Such signals, according to the HAARP Web site, “can penetrate deeply beneath the surface and interact with the geological structure of the Earth. ... The research called for in this effort is to assess the viability of exploiting the concept of electromagnetic induction to detect and image subterranean features such as tunnels, bunkers and other potential military targets.”
Officials have said the detection of underground facilities was a byproduct of the main research mission of the project — “simulating the aurora borealis to determine how we can compensate for its effects on our satellites,” as one official put it. HAARP has also become a favorite of conspiracy theorists who see it as a “death ray,” a means of “mind control” on a massive scale and a phenomenon responsible for widespread buzzing sounds heard in Germany and during Turkish earthquakes.
Just a week before the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the Office of Naval Research announced that it was negotiating with a Washington contractor, Advanced Power Technologies Inc., to enhance the system and bring it to full power. HAARP has been running at about one-quarter of its planned power.
It is not known if HAARP has been used in the hunt for bin Laden’s caves, and attempts to reach Advanced Power Technologies were fruitless.
However, its Web site describes HAARP’s capabilities this way: “The (VLF/ELF) signals are useful for communications with land forces and submarines and, because they have great penetration range, for the investigation of subterranean formations or structures.”
Advanced Power Technologies also advertises that it has a full range of hyperspectral cameras and data-processing technology along with global ground tomography technology, which it describes as “characterization of underground structures.”
That means the company could easily combine HAARP’s ability to find underground structures with its own ability to find minute gradations in ground temperatures.
Although U.S. officials declined to say whether HAARP or other similar technologies were being used, they noted that looking for bin Laden was an “all-source intelligence effort.”
(NewsMax.com-11-27-01)
The man who hunted down and jailed Carlos the Jackal, the world's most notorious terrorist, is now warning that the U.S. faces a deadly threat from terrorists now operating undetected in this country.
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, France's chief anti-terrorism official, told journalist Christophe Calais that well-concealed terrorists cells in the U.S. could easily use cyanide to poison water supplies here.
Writing in Saturday's New York Times, Calais revealed that the French terrorism expert warned that neither the destruction of the Taliban nor even the capture of Osama bin Laden would end the threat of terrorism. Newer terrorist networks, he told Calais, are unlike those of the past, which "had a loose but identifiable hierarchy and structure."
"I am very anxious," Bruguiere told the Times. "There are many autonomous cells in Europe and North America we do not know about.
"They do not need orders from Osama bin Laden to carry out the jihad. They finance their own operations with credit card fraud and theft. The threat, even with Osama bin Laden gone, is very high.
"These groups are protean; they change their shape like the AIDS virus. The way they communicate or carry out one operation is not the way they carry out the next one. And many of them, especially those associated with the group known as the Takfiris, are so integrated into Western society, even eating pork, drinking and wearing Western clothes as a cover, that they are almost impossible to discover beforehand."
He described the Takfiris as "a radical sect that traces its origins back to Egypt in the 1960s. Fiercely devoted to destroying those they see as the enemies of Islam, they are willing to adopt local customs to blend in with foreigners."
The French expert believes that Mohamed Atta, ringleader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was a member of the group, which stays away from Islamic mosques and instead does its worshipping in apartments, making it much harder to detect and monitor.
The movement, he said, is "the most dangerous because it rejects the authenticity of even other Islamic groups and thinks it alone knows the truth."
The next terrorist attack may not be anything like those of the past, he said.
"We know terrorists were trained in Afghanistan in the use of chemical and biological weapons," he said, "although they do not have nuclear weapons. We have seen evidence of planning for poisoning water supplies, including with cyanide. It would be very easy and very hard to prevent."
According to the Times, Bruguiere hunted down the Venezuelan terrorist Ilich Ramírez Sanchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, in Sudan in 1994. Sanchez, who is blamed for murdering 83 victims, was tried in France and given a life sentence.
Bruguiere, the Times says, is one of the world's most effective and well-informed anti-terrorism officials with scores of arrests and convictions to his credit.
10-19-1
A U.S. government expert said that the weapon captured by Israel was a backpack device that CIA officials learned about through Russian intelligence agents in place in 1995. He emphasized it was not a so-called nuclear suitcase bomb. (highmarkfunds.stockpoint.com via Rense)
ISRAEL - Israeli security last month arrested a man linked to suspected terrorist coordinator, Osama bin Laden, armed with a radiological backpack bomb.
The man was arrested in the last week of September as he attempted to enter Israel from the Palestinian Territories at a border crossing point at Ramallah, according to U.S. government officials.
"There was only one individual involved. He was from Pakistan," a government official said.
An official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, declined to give the exact date of arrest. Two other sources interviewed by United Press International confirmed the incident, but also declined to give further details.
"People know how to walk a dog back," one said, meaning that relating too exact an account could lead to the identification of the source of the information.
Another source said U.S. officials believed that the suspect had probably reached the territories by way of Lebanon.
Information on the arrest went immediately to President Bush and a close circle of advisers, another U.S. official said. He described the appearance and character of the top-secret report circulated among the Cabinet members and signed by each official present.
Former Pentagon terrorism expert Peter Probst described a radiological bomb as a device with a small explosive core that is encased in radioactive material. "It would not kill a great many people, but it would contaminate a considerable area with radiation," he said.
A U.S. government expert said that the weapon captured by Israel was a backpack device that CIA officials learned about through Russian intelligence agents in place in 1995. He emphasized it was not a so-called nuclear suitcase bomb.
Backpack bombs were designed for Russian Spetznaz special forces and have such an intricate and complex system of activation that the ability of a terrorist to detonate one would be incredibly limited, according to one U.S. government official.
"There is such a complicated sequence you have to perform that some terrorist isn't going to be able to get it to work. You have to be very highly trained," an intelligence official agreed, describing the chances that the device could have been activated as "practically miniscule."
Probst is nevertheless convinced that radiological bombs are still a danger for New York City. "Bin Laden is fascinated by Wall Street. My fear is that he will attempt to smuggle in some "dirty" bomb that wouldn't kill many people but would dangerously contaminate the area," he said.
The Times - London 10-29-1
A team of British amateur explorers may have found evidence for the existence of the Sumatran Yeti.
Early analysis shows that samples of hair and footprints taken on the team's trip to the Indonesian jungle do not appear to come from any known primate in the region. Some scientists believe that they may belong to the orang-pendek, or Sumatran Yeti, a creature first mentioned by Marco Polo after he visited the island in 1292.
Clumps of hair are to be sent for DNA analysis in Oxford to determine whether they are those of a new species, which would most likely be a relative of the orang-utan or the gibbon.
The orang-pendek is reputed to resemble the orang-utan. It has orange hair and stands about 5ft tall, but walks with a more upright stance and lives mainly on the ground. It is not supposed to be dangerous to people.
Adam Davies, an Internet project manager from Manchester, led the expedition to the mountain rainforest near Gunung Kerinci, in western Sumatra. "We are getting indications from the scientists that we may be on to something, and I have no doubt myself that this creature exists," he said. "We heard its calls, and we've discovered a trail that can,t be explained by anything else."
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,2-2001373161,00.html
Here we go again with another classic unfound documentary to join the hallowed ranks of Rangi Gadgi and the Mapangari.
20 Feb 2002 18:17:59
YELLOWKNIFE - Scientists studying the earth's magnetic field say the North Pole could be in Russia before the century is half over.
The magnetic pole has never been in one fixed location, but scientists have recently realized how fast it can move.
Larry Newitt, a scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada in Ottawa, says he clocked the pole moving toward Canada's 200-mile limit at about 40 kilometres an hour.
In three years, compasses could point to a spot in international waters, rather than the Canadian Arctic.
At the current rate of drift, the magnetic north pole will move into Russia in less than 48 years.
But the drift is random and totally unpredictable. The pole could just as easily head back to the Boothia Peninsula in what is now Nunavut, where the Sir James Ross discovered it in 1831.
Where it ended up penniless and living alone.
November 05 2001
Northridge (BlackVault) - Documents never before seen by the public's eye, have been released to The Black Vault revealing an extremely scary case of a nuclear decision which almost sparked World War III.
A Norwegian space crew cleared to use Russia's airspace to launch a harmless satellite into orbit. When Norway launched, no one told the radar crew in Russia they would be seeing a rocket fly over them on this dark day in January of 1995.
The button was pushed, President Yeltsin was notified, and the countdown literally began to nuclear holocaust. Yeltsin was given the keys to his nuclear briefcase, the case which held the most valuable codes in the world, those to launch thermal nuclear weapons.
As the countdown was nearing it's end, the perfectly safe observation satellite being launched from a Norwegian rocket, was thought to be an incoming Trident missile, which was launched from a U.S. submarine off the coast of Norway.
Tensions rose and the sweat mounted, as the timer wound down, and down and down. Finally, word got to the appropriate people, this was not World War III, but a harmless rocket that was already cleared. Certainly, not another day at the office.
These documents have never been released to the public before, and were declassified and exclusive to The Black Vault. The "Commission to Assess the Ballistic Missile Threat to the United States" and one more document from the Department of State, prove excellent reading.
"End of 21st century civilisation most likely caused by a snafu in the fubar dept declare historians"
Sun 20 Jan 2002 (scotlandonsunday.com)
HUNDREDS of thousands of Scots born in the mid-Sixties face a higher risk of developing cancer after being exposed to record levels of nuclear fallout from Cold War atomic tests.
If the deep fried stotties don't get 'em first.
(The Billings Gazette Staff)
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