‘Osama bin Laden, the al-Qaeda leader, was obsessed with the singer Whitney Houston and wanted to marry her, a new book claims.
Kola Boof, a Sudanese poet and novelist, who says she was kept against her will as the terrorism mastermind’s mistress in 1996, writes in her autobiography that he wanted to give the star a mansion and make her one of his wives.
“He told me that Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen,” Boof claims in Diary of a Lost Girl, excerpts of which are published in Harper’s magazine.
But bin Laden had less respect for Houston’s husband Bobby Brown, apparently talking about the possibility of having him killed.’
`Attorney-General Philip Ruddock has questioned the culture of complaint over the detention of David Hicks, arguing that no one criticised the detention of “Middle Eastern boys” accused of gang rape for nearly five years before they were convicted.
Comparing supporters of the Adelaide-born terror suspect to communist sympathisers during the Cold War, Mr Ruddock said yesterday he had not heard many complaints when suspects in Sydney’s vicious gang rapes were held for many years as a result of successive legal challenges.’
`The suspected terror plotters arrested in Britain had planned to conceal their liquid or gel explosives inside a modified sports beverage drink container and trigger the device with the flash from a disposable camera.
ABC News has learned exclusively that the plotters planned to leave the top of the bottle sealed and filled with the original beverage but add a false bottom, filled with a liquid or gel explosive. The terrorists planned to dye the explosive mixture red to match the sports drink sealed in the top half of the container.’
`The Bush administration, bowing to court edict and political pressure, guaranteed the basic protections of the Geneva Conventions to captives in the war on terrorism and asked lawmakers Tuesday to restore the military tribunals now in limbo.
As senators took up the prickly question of how suspected terrorists should be treated and tried, the administration disclosed it had ordered a review of military detention practices to make sure they comply with Geneva standards.
The administration has refused to grant Geneva status to the detainees held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere, saying they were not from a recognized nation, were not captured in uniform and did not observe traditional rules of war.’
`US President George W Bush has said he would like to close the US prison camp at Guantanamo Bay and send many detainees back to their home countries.
However, he said not all the inmates would be returned – some would need to be put on trial in the US because they were “cold-blooded killers”.’
`Sydney workers have been told to prepare individual emergency packs, containing maps, water bottles and additional clothing, in case of a terror attack.
The suggestion was one of a number of guidelines, launched at a forum in Sydney today, to help businesses react to emergencies such as terrorist attacks or fires.
They have been drawn up by NSW emergency services and business groups as part of the Sydney CBD Emergency Sub Plan.’
`People in European and Muslim countries see US policy in Iraq as a bigger threat to world peace than Iran’s nuclear programme, a survey has shown.
The survey by the Pew Research Group also found support for US President George W Bush and his “war on terror” had dropped dramatically worldwide.’
`Two men from Saudi Arabia and one from Yemen were found dead shortly after midnight today in separate cells, said the Miami-based US Southern Command, which has jurisdiction over the prison. Attempts were made to revive them, but they failed.
“They hung themselves with fabricated nooses made out of clothes and bed sheets,” base commander Navy Rear Adm. Harry Harris told reporters in a conference call from the US base in southeastern Cuba.
“They have no regard for human life,” he said. “Neither ours nor their own. I believe this was not an act of desperation but an act of asymmetric warfare against us.”‘
Also Guantanamo suicides a ‘PR move’:
`A top US official has described the suicides of three detainees at the US base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as a “good PR move to draw attention”.’
`A North Texas man is keeping an unusual piece of military history in his yard near Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport.
An anti-aircraft gun from the Korean conflict designed to bring down airplanes sits in the man’s front yard off of Valley View Road in Irving.
NBC 5 found out about the gun after receiving calls and e-mails from viewers who were concerned the gun was being used to target aircraft taking off from D/FW airport.’
`Prisoners wielding improvised weapons clashed with guards trying to stop a detainee from committing suicide at the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the military said Friday.
The fight occurred Thursday in a medium-security section of the camp as guards were responding to the fourth attempted suicide that day at the detention center on the U.S. Navy base, said Cmdr. Robert Durand.
Detainees used fans, light fixtures and other improvised weapons to attack the guards as they entered a communal living area to stop a prisoner who was trying to hang himself, Durand said.
Earlier in the day, three detainees in another part of the prison attempted suicide by swallowing prescription medicine they had been hoarding.’
`Some 200,000 guns the US sent to Iraqi security forces may have been smuggled to terrorists, it was feared yesterday.
The 99-tonne cache of AK47s was to have been secretly flown out from a US base in Bosnia. But the four planeloads of arms have vanished.
Orders for the deal to go ahead were given by the US Department of Defense. But the work was contracted out via a complex web of private arms traders.
And the Moldovan airline used to transport the shipment was blasted by the UN in 2003 for smuggling arms to Liberia, human rights group Amnesty has discovered.’
`A newspaper promotion for Tom Cruise’s upcoming “Mission: Impossible III” got off to an explosive start when a county arson squad blew up a news rack, thinking it contained a bomb.
The confusion: the Los Angeles Times rack was fitted with a digital musical device designed to play the “Mission: Impossible” theme song when the door was opened. But in some cases, the red plastic boxes with protruding wires were jarred loose and dropped onto the stack of newspapers inside, alarming customers.
Sheriff’s officials said they rendered the news rack in this suburb 35 miles north of downtown Los Angeles “safe” after being called to the scene Friday by a concerned individual who thought he’d seen a bomb.’
`The Iraqi actor who plays the lead hijacker in the new 9/11 film United 93 has been refused a visa to the United States to attend the premiere, it was reported today.
Lewis Alsamari was told this week by the US embassy in London that he is unlikely to be allowed to enter the US for the first public screening next Tuesday in New York, where it is due to open the Tribeca Film Festival, a newspaper said.’
`Fire departments are using Homeland Security grants to buy gym equipment, sponsor puppet and clown shows, and turn first responders into fitness trainers.
The spending choices are allowable under the guidelines of the Assistance to Firefighters grant administered by the Homeland Security Department, which has awarded nearly 250 grants since February totaling more than $25 million out of the current spending pot of $545 million.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff vowed to redirect grant spending based on risk of a terrorist attack, but Congress has ignored his pleas, federal officials say.
“The administration has not supported the funding for physical fitness equipment as part of the fire grant program,” says Marc Short, Homeland Security spokesman. “Physical fitness is an individual responsibility.”
The Bush administration has specifically asked Congress not to allow funding for physical fitness, but the members who run Congress’ appropriation committees keep inserting the language into the department’s budget, officials say.’
`The Pentagon’s fringe science arm wants to keep track of potential enemies-of-the-state in every way imaginable: not just by sight, or by sound, or by their e-mail; but by their smell, as well.
Darpa’s “Unique Signature Detection Project (formerly known as the Odortype Detection program)” aims to sniff out genetic markers in “human emanations (urine, sweat, etc.)” that “can be used to identify and distinguish specific high-level-of-interest individuals within groups of enemy troops.”
“Recent experimental results” show that chemical compounds in a mouse’s “urinary” scent produces an “odortype” that’s unique to each individual rodent, Darpa observes in its original solicitation for the project. “Although experimental data for humans is far less quantitative,” the agency is hoping that a similarly “genetically determined,” “exploitable chemosignal” can be found in people, too.’
`Speaking at an erotic fair in Bucharest, Romania, Cicciolina said: “It is time someone did something about Bin Laden, and I am ready to do it. “I am ready to make a deal, he can have me in exchange for an end to his tyranny. My breasts have only ever helped people while Bin Laden has killed thousands of innocent victims.” The blonde porn star, whose real name is Anna Ilona Staller, pointed out that Bin Laden could learn from Saddam Hussein’s mistakes. In the 1990s she offered herself to Saddam Hussein if he gave up dictatorship of Iraq, and added that if he had taken up her offer “who knows what might have happened.”’
`Last year, a likable and accomplished scientist named Serguei Popov, who for nearly two decades developed genetically engineered biological weapons for the Soviet Union, crossed the Potomac River to speak at a conference on bioterrorism in Washington, DC. [..]
“When I came to Texas, I decided to forget everything,” Popov told me. “For seven years I did that. Now it’s different. It’s not because I like talking about it. But I see every day in publications that nobody knows what was done in the Soviet Union and how important that work was.”
Yet if Popov’s appearance last year at the Washington conference is any indication, it will be difficult to convince policymakers and scientists of the relevance of the Soviet bioweaponeers’ achievements. It wasn’t only that Popov’s audience in the high-ceilinged chamber of a Senate office building found the Soviets’ ingenious applications of biological science morally repugnant and technically abstruse. Rather, what Popov said lay so far outside current arguments about biodefense that he sounded as if he had come from another planet.’
`British anti-terrorism detectives escorted a man from a plane after a taxi driver had earlier become suspicious when he started singing along to a track by punk band The Clash, police said Wednesday.
Detectives halted the London-bound flight at Durham Tees Valley Airport in northern England and Harraj Mann, 24, was taken off. [..]
Mann told British newspapers the taxi had been fitted with a music system which allowed him to plug in his MP3 player and he had been playing The Clash, Procol Harum, Led Zeppelin and the Beatles to the driver.
“He didn’t like Led Zeppelin or The Clash but I don’t think there was any need to tell the police,” Mann told the Daily Mirror.’
`To James Valverde , a risk management expert at the Insurance Information Institute in New York City , the religious xenophobia of Islamic terrorists is reason to worry.
“Given the religious fervor and underlying ideology in which this jihad is being pursued, it’s not completely out of the realm of possibility to assume that Christian churches would be on the receiving end of terrorist attacks,” he said. “It hasn’t occurred yet, but that’s not to say it couldn’t happen.”
However, that is not why insurance companies are offering churches terrorism insurance.
Reacting to Sept. 11, Congress passed the Terrorism Risk Insurance Extension Act in 2002. It required all property and casualty insurance companies to offer terrorism insurance to all clients. Clients are not obligated to buy the coverage.’
`The most memorable moment of Terica Washington’s 30th birthday Monday was looking into the sky and seeing an airplane towing a black banner with words written in white: “6/6/06 You have been warned”.
She was alarmed enough to call the FBI.
“It made me feel really creepy, especially in this day and age,” said Washington, who works at Ocean Walk Resort. Noting that June 6 is a Tuesday, she drew the connection to Sept. 11, 2001, also a Tuesday.
“I thought it might be terrorists,” she said.’
`When President Bush signed the reauthorization of the USA Patriot Act this month, he included an addendum saying that he did not feel obliged to obey requirements that he inform Congress about how the FBI was using the act’s expanded police powers. [..]
Bush signed the bill with fanfare at a White House ceremony March 9, calling it ”a piece of legislation that’s vital to win the war on terror and to protect the American people.” But after the reporters and guests had left, the White House quietly issued a ”signing statement,” an official document in which a president lays out his interpretation of a new law.
In the statement, Bush said that he did not consider himself bound to tell Congress how the Patriot Act powers were being used and that, despite the law’s requirements, he could withhold the information if he decided that disclosure would ”impair foreign relations, national security, the deliberative process of the executive, or the performance of the executive’s constitutional duties.”‘
`This is not a game.
You can’t win and you can’t lose.
This is a simulation.
It has no ending. It has already begun.
The rules are deadly simple. You can shoot. Or not.’
`The Pakistan foreign office had paid tens of thousands of dollars to lobbyists in the US to get anti-Pakistan references dropped from the 9/11 inquiry commission report, The Friday Times has claimed.
The Pakistani weekly said its story is based on disclosures made by foreign service officials to the Public Accounts Committee at a secret meeting in Islamabad on Tuesday.
It claimed that some of the commission members were also bribed to prevent them from including damaging information about Pakistan.’
`The war on terror will not have a definitive end, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told about 200 people gathered Thursday night for Mercer University’s Executive Forum.
“We’re not going to have a ‘VT Day’ over terrorism because terrorism has been around for centuries,” Ridge said.
But that does not mean the United States will be defeated, he said.
“We’ll prevail for one basic reason,” said the former two-term governor of Pennsylvania. “Because America is an idea, not a place. And that idea is freedom.”‘
‘A two-year probe into the Madrid train bombings concludes the Islamic terrorists who carried out the blasts were homegrown radicals acting on their own rather than at the behest of Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network, two senior intelligence officials said.
Spain still remains home to a web of radical Algerian, Moroccan and Syrian groups bent on carrying out attacks — and aiding the insurgency against U.S. troops in Iraq — the Spanish intelligence chief and a Western official intimately involved in counterterrorism measures in Spain told The Associated Press.’
`Thirty new terrorist organizations have emerged since the September 11, 2001, attacks, outpacing U.S. efforts to crush the threat, said Brig. Gen. Robert L. Caslen, the Pentagon’s deputy director for the war on terrorism.
“We are not killing them faster than they are being created,” Gen. Caslen told a gathering at the Woodrow Wilson Center yesterday, warning that the war could take decades to resolve.
Gen. Caslen said that two years ago the Department of Defense had not settled on a clear definition of the nature of the war. Moreover, because each government department had its own perspective, “we all had different strategies,” he said.
The Defense Department now has defined the nature of the war, he said. The enemy, he said, is “a transnational movement of extremist organizations, networks and individuals that use violence and terrorism as a means to promote their end.” It is not a global insurgency, the general said.’
`A Kuwaiti man being held at Guantanamo Bay has told the BBC in a rare interview that the force-feeding of hunger strikers amounts to torture.
Fawzi al-Odah said hunger strikers were strapped to a chair and force-fed through a tube three times a day.
A senior US official denied the use of torture in Guantanamo Bay.
Mr Odah’s comments, relayed by his lawyer in answer to BBC questions, came as another inmate launched a legal challenge to the force-feeding policy.’
`A sticker on a bicycle that said “this bike is a pipe bomb” caused a scare Thursday at Ohio University that shut down four buildings before authorities learned the message was the name of a punk rock band, a university spokesman said. [..]
Police blocked streets around the restaurant and the Columbus police bomb squad came from about 65 miles away.
The bomb experts hit the bike with a high-pressure spray of water, then pried it apart with a hydraulic device normally used to rescue accident victims trapped in cars, acting Athens Fire Chief Ken Gilbraith said. Once they had it open, they saw there was no bomb.
The buildings, including some classroom facilities, were reopened after a couple hours.’
`They paid down some debt. The balance on their JCPenney Platinum MasterCard had gotten to an unhealthy level. So they sent in a large payment, a check for $6,522.
And an alarm went off. A red flag went up. The Soehnges’ behavior was found questionable.
And all they did was pay down their debt. They didn’t call a suspected terrorist on their cell phone. They didn’t try to sneak a machine gun through customs.
They just paid a hefty chunk of their credit card balance. And they learned how frighteningly wide the net of suspicion has been cast. [..]
They were told, as they moved up the managerial ladder at the call center, that the amount they had sent in was much larger than their normal monthly payment. And if the increase hits a certain percentage higher than that normal payment, Homeland Security has to be notified. And the money doesn’t move until the threat alert is lifted.’
`SAS troops were last night poised to storm into Afghanistan and capture Osama bin Laden.
Special forces have “good intelligence” the al-Qaeda boss or a senior henchman is holed up in a Taliban enclave.
Two squadrons are on stand-by waiting for the go-ahead from reconnaissance troops on the ground in Afghanistan.
Specialist counter-terrorist soldiers in the rapid-deployment group are on high alert at the SAS’s Hereford base.
The other team consists of troops serving around the world.’
