Flash Gordon Left Me The Keys

What are the chances that everyone of these places had an unfriendly server?

Predator sux!!! it inhibits the crowd from gathering on the net!!

There is always something rocking Casa Blanca ...At Least 20 Die in Casablanca Blasts
At least 20 die in Casablanca blasts Four explosions rock Casablanca, killing at least 20 people, Interior Ministry officials say
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Just days after terrorist bombings in Saudi Arabia, four explosions tore through the coastal city of Casablanca Friday night, killing at least 20 people in blasts near a synagogue, nightclubs and the Belgian consulate, officials said.

Two policemen outside the heavily damaged consulate were killed and a security guard was hospitalized, Belgian Foreign Ministry spokesman Didier Seeuws told the Belgian news agency Belgas.

A U.S. official said that the blasts were caused by car bombs and at least one occurred near a synagogue. ``No U.S. government facility was targeted,'' U.S. State Department spokeswoman Joanne Moore said in Washington.

The Interior Ministry said at least 20 people were killed and several other injured. Security officials said there were burned-out vehicles at the four sites near consulates and restaurants in the center of the city, Morocco's economic center about 60 miles southwest of capital of Rabat.

Belgian Foreign Minister Louis Michel sent a message of condolences to the Moroccan government denouncing all forms of terrorism.

It wasn't immediately clear who was behind the attacks in Morocco. But U.S. counterterrorism officials in Washington had warned Friday of a coordinated effort by Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network to strike lightly defended targets worldwide, citing the bombings earlier this week in Saudi Arabia as well as threats in Africa and Asia.

Abdullah ben Ali, a correspondent in Casablanca for the Arab satellite television station Al-Arabiya, said he witnessed one explosion at the ``Casa Espana'' nightclub, frequented mainly by Spaniards, and at the Hotel Safir, suggesting Western targets.

Morocco, a french-speaking country, has a population of about 30 million, mostly Sunni Muslim people with small Christian and Jewish communities. Both Belgium and Spain have large Moroccan immigrant populations.

Morocco, considered a moderate Arab nation, has been a staunch U.S. ally. But it expressed regret that a peaceful solution could not be found in the Iraq crisis.

The Moroccan public turned out in large numbers for anti-war protests against the Iraq war, including one in the capital, Rabat, in March that drew 200,000 people.

Monday's suicide blasts in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, killed 34 people at three foreigners' housing compounds.

Three Saudis were arrested in Casablanca last year for leading an al-Qaida plot to attack U.S. and British warships. The three were given 10-year prison sentences in February by a Moroccan court.

The Saudis are also accused of having planned to blow up a cafe in Marrakech, a major tourist destination, and attack tourist buses in Morocco.

All three Saudis admitted under interrogation that they had been trained in the use of weapons and explosives at al-Qaida camps in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

U.S. and British authorities had warned of threats in East Africa, particularly Kenya, and in southeast Asia, particularly Malaysia. U.S. officials also received an unconfirmed report that a possible terrorist attack may occur in the western Saudi city of Jiddah.

Al-Qaida has suffered serious blows in recent months, including the capture of alleged Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But senior al-Qaida leaders were thought to be hiding in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran, U.S. officials said.

In another North African country, an explosion on April 11, 2002, tore apart sections of a synagogue on the Tunisian resort island of Djerba, killing 21 people, mostly foreign tourists. The blast has been linked to Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida network.

1995 congressional memo warned of terror vulnerability (Mechanical Aircraft Training)


Nearly six years before the Sept. 11 attacks, the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman was told by his senior staff that the FBI and other government agencies had missed warning signs about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and were ill-prepared to prevent future domestic terrorist attacks, memos show.

Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, whose committee oversees federal law enforcement, approved holding investigative hearings about the information, but they never took place, the memos show.

"The sharing of intelligence is lacking among federal law enforcement agencies," the December 1995 memo to Hatch stated, citing intelligence failures eerily similar to those exposed after the Sept. 11, 2001, suicide hijackings by al-Qaida terrorists.

The memo, obtained by The Associated Press, also told Hatch that committee investigators had uncovered evidence that federal law enforcement had prior hints about the 1993 World Trade Center terrorist attack in New York City but failed to piece them together.

"We have information that some instances, like the World Trade Center, could have been prevented if the relevant agencies had worked in concert with each other," the investigators wrote. "Simply stated, several different agencies had a small piece of the puzzle.

"If they had shared with each other, there is at least a strong possibility that they would have identified the World Trade Center as a target before the bombing."

The memo described the need for a congressional investigation as "appropriate and imperative." Hatch approved the plan for hearings recommended by his chief investigator and senior investigative counsel, signing the memo "OK" and initialing it with his trademark "O".

Hatch's office said while the memo's plan for hearings never materialized, the chairman did hold about a dozen hearings in 1995 and 1996 dealing with terrorism issues and sponsored legislation to give the FBI more powers to catch terrorists, some of which passed in 1996 within months of the memo.

"The legislation was the most significant piece of anti-terrorism legislation passed in two decades and Senator Hatch constantly fought to give the FBI and the Department of Justice more tools to share information and prevent terrorist attacks," said Makan Delrahim, Hatch's staff director on the Judiciary Committee.

The investigators wrote at least two other memos to Hatch's chief of staff recommending continued investigation of the FBI's anti-terrorism efforts. "We need to continue our oversight in these areas," a memo urged one month before the 1996 presidential election.

Senators and Senate Judiciary Committee aides in both parties said Thursday they were unaware of the 1995 memo's information and said it shows that Congress, which heaped criticism on the executive branch over the Sept. 11 failures, must share in the blame.

Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, a fellow Republican on the Judiciary Committee, said he had never seen the memo before and wanted to discuss it with Hatch.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan., said the memo's contents mirrored the problems unearthed by House and Senate intelligence committee investigators who reviewed the Sept. 11 attacks.

"There were egregious errors, in hindsight," Roberts said. Asked if those errors included Congress' failure to provide oversight and follow information like that in the 1995 memo, Roberts added: "Big time in Congress."

Hatch's office said he was recognized on Capitol Hill long before Sept. 11 as a leading voice on terrorism who led hearings on issues like his legislation to increase FBI power, the dangers of explosives information on the Internet and preventing terror attacks at the Olympics.

The office also said Hatch led efforts in the mid-1990s to improve the FBI's ability to share and receive intelligence. Some of those measures were stripped by Congress before his legislation became law in 1996.

"Had these measures been in place prior to 9/11, law enforcement agencies may well have been able to catch some or all of the terrorists," Hatch wrote earlier this week in an opinion piece published in USA Today.

But a former Republican investigator on Hatch's committee, who worked on the investigation that prompted the 1995 memo, accused the chairman of "frustrating our attempts to oversee the FBI."

Kris Kolesnik, who worked on the committee for Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said Hatch preferred not to air the FBI's problems in public. "His solution to problems within the FBI is to send more money, create more bureaucracy and give them more authority to trample our civil liberties," he said. "That is not oversight. That is a knee-jerk reaction that has never worked."

Delrahim, Hatch's staff director, strongly disagreed. "The memorandum makes it clear that Senator Hatch supported investigations and oversight of this matter. To suggest in any manner that Orrin Hatch does not care about stopping terrorism or performing oversight is laughable," he said.

The FBI said most of the concerns cited in the 1995 memo have been addressed by Director Robert Mueller since Sept. 11 with the creation of 66 counterterrorism task forces, new computer systems, an improved language interpreters program, improved intelligence analysis, and improved sharing of threat information between federal and local police.

"In two years we have made significant strides," the FBI said. "The director recognized we did have deficiencies and the fact is we are addressing them. The bureau has changed its mission."

The public airing of confidential memos between senior Senate staff and a committee chairman is rare. Congress is exempt from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act, and political decorum on Capitol Hill often keeps internal disagreements from becoming public.

But the 1995 and 1996 memos emerge as Hatch has endured recent criticisms from some colleagues for declining to investigate the FBI's handling of Chinese intelligence assets in the aftermath of California case in which a former FBI agent was charged with allowing his lover to pass secrets along to China.

The December 1995 memo specifically warned the FBI was ill-prepared to deal with terrorist weapons of mass destruction.

"The major problem in this arena appears to be the lack of training and equipment in situations that involve nuclear, biological and chemical substances," the memo said.

The memo also said investigators had gathered evidence that a Florida company specializing in preventing corporate espionage had offered to train the FBI in technology that could be used to detect terrorists, but the bureau declined.

"The FBI's response is that the technique used by this company is too difficult to learn and therefore the FBI is not interested," the memo told Hatch.

The Baltimore Sun reported on 16 May that the NSA is seeking further to shield its activities in ...

The National Security Agency, one of the country's most clandestine agencies, is seeking to cloak its activities in what critics say is another layer of secrecy.
Legislation headed for the Senate floor would let the global eavesdropping agency automatically turn down requests by citizens for files on how the NSA collects intelligence.

NSA officials say that they routinely deny requests for so-called "operational files" and that the legislation would simply free the agency's staff from the time-consuming task of searching for and reviewing those files before sending out rejection letters.

But historians, researchers and watchdog groups say the broadly worded measure threatens to close one of the few windows into an enormously powerful agency. The provision, tucked deep within Senate defense and intelligence authorization bills, has drawn little notice on Capitol Hill.

"The danger is the NSA is reverting to the old Soviet Union here, where everything is per se secret and you don't have any means to get around it," said James Bamford, who used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain thousands of NSA documents to write two books on the agency. "Besides the score on the local golf course there, they can say pretty much anything is operational because everything has to do with NSA's operations."

The Fort Meade-based agency says that it is seeking nothing so sweeping. The measure aims only to exempt files describing the "nuts and bolts" of intelligence collection, a spokeswoman said.

On Capitol Hill, most lawmakers have been satisfied with the agency's explanation.

"There's always a question of how much of this you do" in limiting access to government files, said West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the senior Democrat on the Select Committee on Intelligence. "It's a fine line, but it was felt to be OK."

Bill Duhnke, a senior aide to the GOP-led committee, said: "There's a better use of [the agency's] time and effort - the war on terrorism and so forth - than searching for records that are going to be denied anyway."

But critics of the proposal say the exempt files could include everything from properly classified data, such as the cell phone frequencies used by al-Qaida operatives, to harmless information on the radio gear American spies used in the 1960s to eavesdrop in the Soviet Union.

Opponents are only now organizing to fight the bill. Among them are the Federation of American Scientists, the American Library Association, the American Society of Newspaper Editors and the Electronic Privacy Information Center.

In 1984, Congress gave a similar exemption to the CIA, freeing it from aspects of the Freedom of Information Act.

But critics note that the CIA measure was enacted after extensive public hearings. There have been no public hearings on the NSA proposal.

The NSA houses millions of documents from decades of espionage. Though most remain classified, those released have added significantly to the historical understanding of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Kennedy assassination.

The NSA proposal "will not affect how much information FOIA requesters get or how much information will be reviewed and released under the historical review program," an agency spokeswoman said this week in a written response to questions from The Sun. "NSA remains committed to declassifying and releasing as much material as possible."

Because the NSA can invoke national security to deny requests, its proposal is largely put forth as a labor-saver. The agency would not say how many requests for operational files it receives annually or how much time it spends handling them.

Annual Defense Department reports to Congress show that the NSA receives far fewer Freedom of Information Act requests than the CIA. Moreover, the NSA is far less likely to grant such requests, the reports show.

Loch K. Johnson, a University of Georgia intelligence expert, is skeptical of the NSA claim that such requests steal resources from the war on terrorism: "I think that's an excuse. It's already hard enough to find out what's going on in this agency. Further retrenchment will only make it harder."

The bill troubles A. Jay Cristol, an author and federal judge who says the NSA has a tendency to err on the side of secrecy.

Cristol sent an FOIA request to the agency two years ago while writing a book on Israel's 1967 attack on the spy ship USS Liberty. He wanted copies of radio messages intercepted by U.S. planes near the attack.

"The fact of the existence or nonexistence of such information is a properly classified matter," an NSA official responded in a letter last year.

Only after Cristol appealed to a federal court did the agency say it would release some material, court documents show.

Russia's minister of atomic energy has stressed that Moscow's involvement in Iran's ongoing nuclear power programme will continue despite pressure from the USA. ...(still looking)
Russia, India ink "landmark" arms deal

Indian Defense Minister George Fernandes and Russian officials signed an agreement late last week to expand the burgeoning military cooperation between the two states to include the joint development of a next-generation fighter jet and other weapons projects. "It's a landmark document," Fernandes told reporters after talks at the Defense Ministry. "We believe that it will contribute to strengthening our military-to-military relationship." He said that the protocol on military cooperation covers Indian purchases of new Russian weapons and envisages cooperation in building a new fighter aircraft and joint production of the Brahmos cruise missile. The two countries have decided to increase the charter capital of the Brahmos venture from $240 million to $300 million. The Brahmos, based on the Russian Yakhont anti-ship missile, has a range of 300 kilometers and flies at twice the speed of sound. It is expected to be deployed in 2004, becoming the first supersonic cruise missile in India's arsenal. India and Russia are also considering exporting the Brahmos. Fernandes also said that a long-awaited deal on the acquisition of the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Gorshkov will be signed by the end of March, the Saint Petersburg Times quoted him as saying.