30 Arrests Made in Egypt Resort Attack By MARIAM FAM AP Apr 25 7:30 PM US/Eastern DAHAB, Egypt - Egyptian authorities, already struggling with elusive terror cells in the rugged Sinai Peninsula, moved quickly Tuesday - arresting 30 men in the triple bombings that ripped apart a crowded resort town, killing 24 on a tranquil holiday evening. Radical Muslim groups moved just as rapidly to distance themselves from the Dahab attacks. The leader of Egypt's banned Muslim brotherhood condemned them as "aggression on human souls created by God." The militant Palestinian Hamas organization called them a "criminal attack which is against all human values." Many frightened tourists fled Sinai coastal resorts where two previous bomb attacks - like the Dahab blasts - bore the hallmarks of al-Qaida-linked groups that appear to have a free hand to continue operations in the barren, backward and extremely rugged Sinai Peninsula. Egyptian authorities - despite massive sweeps by thousands of troops and hundreds of arrests after each previous Sinai attack - appeared increasingly frustrated by the ease with which terrorists continue to hit the country's vital tourism industry. It brought in $6.4 billion in 2005 and is the top source of foreign exchange. "This incident is addressed to the whole of Egypt, there is no reason for it other than an attempt to destroy the economy of Egypt by attacking tourism," said Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif as he visited blast victims in a Sharm el-Sheik hospital. President Hosni Mubarak, who oversees an already-stagnant economy with unemployment rising in lockstep with the population explosion, called the attack a "sinful terrorist action." The attacks came just one day after al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden had urged Muslims to support al-Qaida in what he called a war against Islam. Egyptian officials have said local people were behind the previous bombings in the Sinai, but outside security experts say Sinai's extremists seem either al-Qaida linked or at least aligned with its views. Security officials, who refused to be identified because they were not authorized to release the information, said the remains of three men recovered from the scene of the blasts were so badly torn apart that they could have been suicide attackers. Arabs throughout the Middle East voiced outrage, signaling a growing backlash as fellow Muslims increasingly bear the brunt of terrorist attacks. Of the 24 dead in Dahab, 21 were Egyptians. "I don't think these people care" if Muslims or Arabs are killed. "They'll carry on at any price," said Lara Darwazah, a 31-year-old music teacher in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. All three Sinai bombings were timed to Egyptian national holidays when resorts were especially crowded with local tourists as well as foreigners who flock to the seaside towns, the world-renowned beaches and extraordinary reefs. Taba and Ras Shitan in the northern Sinai near the Israeli border were hit and 34 killed in October 2004, a day before the holiday marking the start of the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. Last July 23 - Egypt's national day - suicide bombers killed 64 people, mainly tourists, in Sharm el-Sheik on the southern tip of the Sinai. Monday's Dahab bombings occurred on the eve of Sinai Liberation Day, when Egypt regained full control of the peninsula from Israel in 1986. The tourist population was swollen further by the coincidence of the long Coptic Christian Easter weekend and an ancient Egyptian holiday to mark the start of spring. Egypt's Sinai resorts are a tempting and virtually made-to-order target for Islamic militants who were jailed by Mubarak or fled to safer territory and became even more radical_ witness Egyptian physician Ayman al-Zawheri's migration to Afghanistan and the No. 2 place in al-Qaida. The isolated and desolate peninsula also has become a favored Israeli holiday destination, making bombings there both a symbolic attack on Israelis and an assault to undermine Mubarak's authority and rattle his tenuous economy. Interior Minister Habib el-Adly said it was not immediately clear if the attack could have been carried out by a group as organized as those who detonated the earlier bombs. He said the explosives were different than those used in Sharm el-Sheik or Taba. The blasts were so powerful that police divers worked Tuesday to retrieve body parts from the shallow waters of the sea, as workers swept shards of glass from the streets. At one spot near the beach, two black sandals lay in a pool of blood on a wooden footbridge. Nearby, outside the supermarket where one blast occurred, a tiny shoe covered in blood lay on top of a baby stroller. Witnesses said the stroller belonged to foreign twin infants who they said looked European. One twin was inside the shop with the mother when the blast occurred, and the other outside in the stroller, said Mohammed Emad, 16, who sells spices at the market and whose hand was hurt by flying glass. The boy said he went with the mother and twins to hospital, where one of the twins died. "I pushed the stroller away out of the doorway" after the blast, he said. El-Adly put the death toll at 23, including 20 Egyptians and three foreigners. But Sinai hospital officials said Tuesday that an Egyptian man had died of his wounds, bringing the toll to 24. The German Foreign Ministry said a 10-year-old German boy was among the dead. Dr. Hazem Ahmed of Sharm el-Sheik Hospital said 85 people were wounded. The World Economic Forum said it would go ahead with plans to hold a meeting of Middle Eastern government and business leaders in Sharm-el- Sheik on May 20-22. "For the sake of a more peaceful future for humankind we have to show our solidarity by holding this meeting," said Klaus Schwab, the Geneva-based convener of the forum, in a letter to Mubarak. The Dahab attack seemed consistent with the aims of hardline al-Qaida sympathizers, often called Salafists. In contrast, groups like Hamas have been careful to say that their attacks are aimed only against Israel, and are not part of a worldwide radical Islamic jihad.

Missing bioterror substances have officials guessing By WAYNE PARRY The Associated Press April 25, 2006 NEWARK, N.J. - In the past year, two New Jersey laboratories have been unable to account for plague-infested mice and vials of deadly anthrax spores, and top state officials are scrambling to devise better ways to safeguard deadly material. In both cases, authorities say they think the items in question weren't actually lost, but were simply unaccounted for due to clerical errors. They can't say for sure - and that has a Rutgers microbiologist predicting more trouble if such substances aren't kept at a central location. "The fact that they don't know the answer means they're not running a properly secured facility," professor Richard Ebright said of both cases. "The odds are that it was an accounting error, but it is very possible that one of the persons with access to the lab has removed that material." Last week, state health officials said they could not account for two vials of anthrax bacteria once thought to have been stored at a government laboratory in Trenton. In September, a Newark health research lab lost track of three mice infected with the bacteria responsible for bubonic plague. The mice were never located, and officials said the rodents might have been stolen, eaten by other lab animals or just misplaced in a paperwork error. While the FBI and state authorities are investigating the possibility that the anthrax and mice were removed from the labs, they believe that no crimes have been committed. The state Health Department plans to tell federal authorities on Wednesday it believes the anthrax case is the result of a counting error. Samples of anthrax has been stored at a Trenton lab since shortly after the October 2001 anthrax mailings that went through a Hamilton, N.J., post office, killing four people across the country and sickened 17. Richard Canas, New Jersey's Homeland Security director, said it does appear an accounting error is to blame for the latest case. But he wants better safeguards put in place, including disposing of some of the samples. "I think the genesis was that they were inundated with samples," Canas said. "What I would like to see is bringing this number down. Let's at least cull these down into something more manageable." Ebright, who has been critical of the nation's bioterrorism safety efforts since the anthrax attacks, said more than 300 institutions nationwide and 16,500 individuals were given government clearance to possess deadly bio-agents such as anthrax as part of a plan to study and protect the specimens. "After the mailings in 2001, the logical approach was to tightly restrict the number of institutions and officials with access to the materials," he said. "Precisely the opposite has happened, unfortunately. This is a case when we've spent money to put ourselves at greater risk." That's not to say facilities haven't taken stronger steps on their own. The Trenton lab where the anthrax spores were stored has multiple layers of security, including a padlocked containment area requiring two different sets of identification for access. Only 11 people have such clearance, and all have been questioned, authorities said. The lab also has video monitoring and 24-hour security guards. The Newark lab that lost track of the plague-infested mice conducts bioterrorism research for the federal government. After the incident, the facility improved its video surveillance and stopped using contracted animal handlers. Before the incident, the center relied on a single security guard. Ebright said the U.S. should store all its hazardous bio-agents at a single, secure location rather than having them scattered across the country. "If an adversary of the United States, such as al-Qaida, wanted to obtain this material, the most effective, simple procedure to do so is to plant a person in one of those numerous institutions that the administration has put in place working with this material," he said. "Because the number of those institutions has increased and because it happened without an increase in effective security, the risk to the United States has dramatically increased." Comment: Do you get the impression from stories like this one that the whole "security" schtick isn't actually meant to protect us from Islamic terrorists?

Jury Convicts Calif. Man in Terrorism Case By DON THOMPSON Associated Press Writer Apr 25 7:19 PM US/Eastern SACRAMENTO, Calif. - A federal jury on Tuesday convicted a 23-year-old man of supporting terrorists by attending an al-Qaida training camp in Pakistan three years ago. Hamid Hayat, a seasonal farm worker in Lodi, an agricultural town south of Sacramento, was convicted of one count of providing material support to terrorists and three counts of lying to the FBI. The verdict came hours after a separate jury hearing a case against the man's father deadlocked, forcing the judge to declare a mistrial. The father, 48-year-old ice cream truck driver Umer Hayat, is charged with two counts of lying to the FBI about his son's involvement in the training camp. Defense attorneys and prosecutors will meet in court May 5 to decide whether he will be retried. Both men are U.S. citizens and stood trial in federal court before separate juries. They have been in custody since their arrests last June. Both cases initially generated widespread interest because they raised concerns about a potential terrorist cell centered in the wine-producing region about 35 miles south of the state capital. But the government presented no evidence of a terror network during the nine-week trial. Comment: Do you think that might be because there aren't any "terror networks"? Look at how the Pentagon yesterday announced that it is releasing more prisoners from Guantanamo, and yet it only has plans to charge a couple dozen of the remaining prisoners in kangaroo courts. If these people are really terrorists, why not try them in a real court with real evidence? Because there isn't any evidence. It really is that simple. Instead, the case centered on videotaped confessions the men gave to FBI agents and a government informant who secretly recorded hundreds of hours of conversations but whose credibility was challenged by the defense. Prosecutors described Hamid Hayat as having "a jihadi heart and a jihadi mind" who returned from a two-year visit to Pakistan intent on carrying out attacks. Possible targets included hospitals, banks and grocery stores. They presented no evidence to show that such attacks were imminent or even planned. But in closing arguments, a prosecutors said the case was intended to prevent terrorist attacks "long before anybody is hurt." Comment: What was that we were just saying about the Bush administration not having any evidence against these accused "terrorists"??? Defense lawyers for both men argued that the government didn't have a case against their clients because it had produced no evidence that the son ever attended a terrorist training camp. Their biggest hurdle was trying to persuade jurors to discount the men's videotaped confessions. The statements were given separately last June during lengthy interrogations by the FBI in Sacramento. Defense lawyers said the confessions were made under duress, after the men had been questioned for hours in the middle of the night. The father and son eventually told the agents merely what they thought they wanted to hear, without realizing the legal consequences, their lawyers argued. The trial is the result of what the government initially thought might be a much larger case. Its investigation into Lodi's 2,500-member Pakistani community began after agents received a tip in 2001 that Lodi-area businesses were sending money to terrorist groups abroad. That investigation ultimately fizzled, but it did lead agents to Naseem Khan. The 32-year-old former Lodi resident was working a variety of fast-food and convenience store jobs in rural Oregon when agents approached him in October 2001, just a month after the terrorist attacks. Khan, a Pakistani native who moved to the U.S. as a teenager, was recruited to infiltrate Lodi's Pakistani community. He initially investigated the money laundering allegations and then targeted a pair of local imams before finally befriending Hamid Hayat. The Hayats grew to eventually consider Khan almost a member of the family. After Hamid Hayat left for Pakistan in spring 2003, Khan kept in touch and recorded their telephone calls _ some of which show Khan urging Hayat to attend a jihadi camp. In one conversation, Khan exhorted Hayat to "be a man - do something!" Hamid Hayat's lawyers seized on such conversations to show that the FBI informant pushed Hayat to attend a training camp, but ultimately produced no evidence that he had. They also questioned the informant's credibility, in part because of his own testimony. Khan said that just before he was recruited, he told FBI agents he had seen Osama bin Laden's physician and two other international terrorists living in Lodi during the late 1990s. At the time, they were wanted for attacks in the Middle East and Africa. Defense attorneys and terrorism experts said it was highly unlikely they would have been in the U.S. at that time, a point prosecutors conceded later in the trial. Comment: With a headline and a first few paragraphs like that, you'd think the story ends there, right? Read the rest of the article, which includes more comments...

Flashback: Flight 93 Movie Ignores Officially Reported Facts About The Fate Of Flight Joe Quinn Signs of the Times 31/01/2006 While browsing the news websites recently, I noticed an advertisement for an upcoming movie about Flight 93 that 'crashed' in the Pennsylvannia countryside on September 11th 2001. Here's the ad: Without doubt, this is a deliberate government-sponsored/inspired attempt to further brainwash the masses about the truth of what happened on 9/11. Unfortunately for the Bush gang, the officially recorded events about the final moments of Flight 93 present us with some of the clearest evidence that the U.S. government is lying about what really happened to Flight 93, and by implication, about all other aspects of the 9/11 event. Consider the following facts: According to NORAD's initial statement, Flight 93 was hijacked at 9: 16 a.m., yet they were unable to say when the FAA notified them of the hijacking or how the FAA knew. Flight 93 is the only flight where NORAD could not at least supply this time of notification of hijacking. Despite this, the 9/11 Commission concluded that the hijacking of Flight 93 began at 9:28 a.m. saying only that the original statement by NORAD was incorrect without giving any explanation as to how or why such an error was made. At this same time, Cleveland flight controllers noticed Flight 93 climbing and descending in an erratic way, and shortly thereafter screams and shouts of "get out of here" were heard by controllers over the cockpit transmission. Arabic voices are also heard. At this point contact was lost with Flight 93. Yet despite this, we are told that no one notified NORAD. According to the 9/11 Commission, at 9:36 a.m. Cleveland flight control specifically asked the FAA Command Center whether someone had requested the military to launch fighters toward Flight 93. Cleveland offered to contact a nearby military base. The Command Center replied that FAA personnel well above them in the chain of command have to make that decision and were working on the issue. This single fact suggests that somewhere along the chain of command someone was preventing the implementation of standard procedures taken in respect of suspect aircraft, which is the immediate scrambling of fighter jets. At about 9:36 am Flight 93 made a 180 degree turn and headed back to Washington. Still no fighters were scrambled. From 9:30 am until Flight 93 "crashed", several passengers were alleged to have made calls to their family members and to phone operators specifying that a hijacking was taking place. According to NORAD, Flight 93 crashed at 10:03 am. However, a seismic study authorized by the US Army to determine when the plane crashed concluded that the crash happened at 10:06:05. Furthermore, according to a CNN report, the cockpit voice recording of Flight 93 was recorded on a 30-minute reel which started at 9:31am and ended at 10:02 am, with the last minute of recording apparently missing. This fact led some victim's family members to wonder if the tape had been tampered with. So what exactly happened in that last minute before flight 93 hit the ground in Pennsylvania? Several eyewitness reports of the crash of Flight 93 attest to the presence of a white unmarked military-style jet over-flying the crash scene. The mayor of Shanksville, the closest town to where Flight 93 "crashed" stated: "I know of two people - I will not mention names - that heard a missile, They both live very close, within a couple of hundred yards...This one fellow served in Vietnam and he says he's heard them, and he heard one that day." The mayor adds that based on what he knows about that morning, military F-16 fighter jets were very, very close. Another eyewitness stated that he heard two loud bangs before watching the plane take a downward turn of nearly 90 degrees. It is also a matter of record that the debris of the crash was strewn across an area of approximately 8 miles. Ask yourself: how could parts of a commercial jet that allegedly hit the ground intact be 8 miles from the crash site!? Even CNN reported that: "Near the end of [Flight 93's] cockpit voice recording, loud wind sounds can be heard." And the UK Mirror then confirmed: "Sources claim the last thing heard on the cockpit voice recorder is the sound of wind-suggesting the plane had been holed." All of these facts are clearly consistent with the idea that Flight 93 was shot down. Heck, the evidence that Flight 93 was shot down is so stark that even Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld couldn't help blurting it out: According to the CNN transcript of the event, while he was addressing U.S. troops in Iraq in December 2004, Rumsfeld made the following remark: DONALD RUMSFELD, SECRETARY OF DEFENSE: And to change that way of living, would strike at the very essence of our country. And I think all of us have a sense if we imagine the kind of world we would face if the people who bombed the mess hall in Mosul, or the people who did the bombing in Spain, or the people who attacked the United States in New York, shot down the plane over Pennsylvania and attacked the Pentagon, the people who cut off peoples' heads on television to intimidate, to frighten -- indeed the word "terrorized" is just that. Its purpose is to terrorize, to alter behavior, to make people be something other than that which they want to be. Of course, if Flight 93 was shot down and did not crash as claimed by the US government and 9/11 Commission, not only does this pose serious questions about the authenticity of the alleged phone calls made by passengers to the effect that they were going to try and "do something" to take control of Flight 93 from the hijackers, but it throws all other facets of the official story of what happened on 9/11 into doubt.. Assuming some kind of government conspriracy then, how, you might ask, could the conspriators have possibly faked at least some of the famous cell phone calls? Consider a 1999 report in the Washington Post entitled When Seeing and Hearing Isn't Believing, where it was stated: "'Gentlemen! We have called you together to inform you that we are going to overthrow the United States government.' So begins a statement being delivered by Gen. Carl W. Steiner, former Commander-in-chief, U.S. Special Operations Command. At least the voice sounds amazingly like him. But it is not Steiner. It is the result of voice "morphing" technology developed at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.By taking just a 10-minute digital recording of Steiner's voice, scientist George Papcun is able, in near real time, to clone speech patterns and develop an accurate facsimile. Steiner was so impressed, he asked for a copy of the tape. Steiner was hardly the first or last victim to be spoofed by Papcun's team members. To refine their method, they took various high quality recordings of generals and experimented with creating fake statements. One of the most memorable is Colin Powell stating, 'I am being treated well by my captors.' 'Once you can take any kind of information and reduce it into ones and zeros, you can do some pretty interesting things', says Daniel T. Kuehl, chairman of the Information Operations department of the National Defense University in Washington, the military's school for information warfare. Digital morphing - voice, video, and photo - has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national and battlefield objectives. To some, PSYOPS is a backwater military discipline of leaflet dropping and radio propaganda. To a growing group of information war technologists, it is the nexus of fantasy and reality. Being able to manufacture convincing audio or video, they say, might be the difference in a successful military operation or coup." "The nexus of fantasy and reality" indeed. Given the scope and depth of the conspiracy with which we are dealing, it is entirely possible that at least some of the cell phone calls that were made from the planes on 9/11 - if those reporting them are sincere and believe they received such calls - were actually the result of a 'real time' application of this voice morphing technology. Who could forget the rousing reports of the "soldier citizens" on Flight 93 who courageously decided to "do something" about the hijackers with the words "let's roll"? Mark Bingham, a California PR executive, was a passenger on Flight 93 and one of those involved in the alleged attempts to take back the plane. According to his mother, Bingham called her to tell her that his flight had been hijacked. Bizarrely however, the very first words that Bingham said to his mother, with whom he was very close by all accounts, were, "hi mom, this is Mark Bingham." The only other words he is claimed to have said before hanging up were, "I love you". Now think about this: Why would anyone use their full name when calling their mother?! Would you, in a similar circumstance, call your mother and announce your full name? Really stop and think about it a moment. Could this small and seemingly innocuous detail be an example of the faking of the cell phone calls and just one of the many flaws in the general cover-up attempts by the conspirators? Due to these many striking facts that point to Flight 93 having been shot down, we decided that it was our duty to modifiy the Flight 93 movie advertisement in such a way that it more closely reflects the reality of the situation For the full details of what really went on behind the scenes on the day of September 11th 2001 and a unique expose on who was ultimately responsible for the attacks, see Laura Knight-Jadczyk's new book 9/11:The Ultimate Truth