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Republicans are filled with glee, as Democrats fall all over themselves, trying to diminish the fact that Bill Clinton's former national security adviser, Sandy Berger, was caught stuffing classified documents and national secrets down his drawers, in his jacket, in his socks, and in a leather portfolio, in order to steal them from the National Archives, and to later destroy some of them. (Berger returned some documents, but only after he was caught.) Watergate, meet BVDgate. For the past thirty years, many observers have thought it the height of paranoia for Pres. Richard Nixon's men to burglarize the offices of...

The government for the first time yesterday said illegal immigrants on Algerian-flagged LNG tankers in Boston ``may have had indirect associations'' with the so-called millennium plot to blow up the Los Angeles airport.

Mauritanian national Mohamedou Ould Slahi has been held at Guantanamo for 12 years now without trial and despite a dearth of evidence. A diary he kept of his torture is now being published around the world. […] He was accused of having been acquainted with the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and of having provided them with support and sending them to Afghanistan to receive training. He has also been accused of involvement in the Millennium Plot, the foiled terrorist attack targeting the Los Angeles International Airport. At least that’s the claim made by Ahmed Ressam, the...

W A S H I N G T O N, Sept. 26 — An ambitious terrorist plot to attack a host of American interests overseas was foiled by the capture of a key Osama bin Laden operative, sources tell ABCNEWS. Intelligence sources in Europe and the United States say the intended targets included the American embassy in Paris, the U.S. consulate in Marseilles, France, buildings at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Belgium and the European Parliament building in Strasbourg, France. The outlines of the plan were known to French and American authorities before Sept. 11, but the attacks were not ...

Two more people have been arrested in Seattle and New York, FBI officials said yesterday, as investigators tried to break up a suspected terrorist network they believe was plotting a bomb attack against a US target .... Graham Fuller, a specialist on Islamic extremism and a former CIA analyst, said: "I'm a little sceptical about the possibility that the GIA is now targeting us because it would have been accompanied by some kind of rhetoric. Therefore I would speculate that these guys are working on their own or hired by someone else." And Mr Fuller argued that Mr Ressam's Afghan...

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...

The Turkish Islamic charity behind a flotilla of aid ships that was raided by Israeli forces on its way to Gaza had ties to terrorism networks, including a 1999 al-Qaida plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, France's former top anti-terrorism judge said Wednesday. The Istanbul-based Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief, known by its Turkish acronym IHH, had "clear, long-standing ties to terrorism and Jihad," former investigating judge Jean-Louis Bruguiere told The Associated Press in a telephone interview.

A federal appeals court said Tuesday a 22-year prison sentence was too lenient for an al-Qaida-trained terrorist convicted of plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year's Day 2000. A divided three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Ahmed Ressam deserved a much longer prison term because he had reneged on a deal to cooperate with terrorism investigators around the world. U.S. prosecutors said Ressam's change-of-heart after two years of cooperation compromised at least two terrorist cases in the U.S., resulting in charges being dropped. The appeals court also took the rare step of...

Ahmed Ressam was resentenced this morning to 22 years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport despite telling a judge that he recanted everything he has told the federal government about terrorist activities. Federal prosecutors had urged U.S. District Judge John Coughenour to send Ressam to prison for life — a sentence Ressam said he would accept now that he had cleared his conscience about his cooperation, which ended in 2003. Prosecutors pointed out that Ressam's defiance has cost two high-profile terrorism prosecutions so far, and that Ressam has actively tried to help the cases...

FBI Warns of Potential Terror Attacks The FBI and Department of Homeland Security today issued an analytical "note" to U.S. law-enforcement officials cautioning that al-Qaida terrorists have in the past expressed interest in attacking public buildings using a dozen suicide bombers each carrying 20 kilograms of explosives. Authors with the U.S. Office of Intelligence and Analysis added that they have "no credible or specific information that terrorists are planning operations against public buildings in the United States." The FBI and DHS analysts said they were releasing the note because "it is important for local authorities and building owners and...

A federal appeals court Friday threw out the 22-year sentence imposed on Algerian Ahmed Ressam for plotting to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on the eve of the millennium. The three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals sent the case back to U.S. District Court in Seattle to recalculate a sentence for his conviction on nine felony counts. It was the second time the appellate court has scrapped Ressam's sentence. The San Francisco-based panel noted that the U.S. Supreme Court reversal of its first decision to vacate the term failed to take into consideration recent federal sentencing guidelines...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

U.S. Wary Of Small Boat Terrorism As boating season approaches, the Bush administration wants to enlist America's 80 million recreational boaters to help reduce the chances that a small boat could deliver a nuclear or radiological bomb somewhere along the 95,000 miles of U.S. coastline and inland waterways. According to an April 23 intelligence assessment obtained by The Associated Press, "The use of a small boat as a weapon is likely to remain al Qaeda's weapon of choice in the maritime environment, given its ease in arming and deploying, low cost, and record of success." While the United States...

WASHINGTON, (AP) -- The Supreme Court agreed Friday to consider reinstating part of the conviction of the man who planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport, case the government says will greatly affect terrorism prosecutions. Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian national, was sentenced to 22 years in prison in 2005 after being convicted on nine counts for plotting to bomb the airport around Jan. 1, 2000. Customs agents in Port Angeles caught him with explosives in the trunk of his rental car when he drove off a ferry from British Columbia in December 1999. The ensuing scare prompted the cancellation of...

BRITAIN has resorted to detaining as an illegal immigrant a man regarded as one of al-Qaeda’s most dangerous terrorists. Abu Doha, whose various aliases include “The Doctor”, has been in Belmarsh highsecurity jail for almost six years facing extradition to the United States on charges of running a jihad training camp in Afghanistan and plotting to blow up Los Angeles airport. But the US has been forced to drop the case against him after an informer refused to give evidence. A British judge described the extremist network created by Abu Doha as “one of the most significant groups of terrorists...

Abu Hamza, the militant, London-based Muslim cleric, maintained close contact with the leadership of al-Qa'eda during the years when it operated a worldwide terrorist network from Afghanistan, according to FBI files. Documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph state that Hamza, the former imam of Finsbury Park mosque, north London, dealt personally with Abu Zubeidah, Osama bin Laden's director of operations. Zubeidah, a Palestinian who is now in US custody, communicated bin Laden's instructions and messages from his hideout in Afghanistan to al-Qa'eda cells around the world. Hamza had the power to refer recruits to Zubeidah for "leadership training" in Afghan...

The United Nations announced Wednesday it has imposed sanctions on a man with dual Canadian and Sudanese citizenship who allegedly worked with Abu Zubaydah, al-Qaeda's one-time operations chief in Afghanistan. The UN Security Council committee in charge of anti-terrorism sanctions against al-Qaeda and remnants of the Taliban added Abu Sufian Al-Salamabi Muhammed Ahmed Abd Al-Razziq to its sanctions list on July 31. The move follows joint action taken in July by the U.S. State Department and Treasury Department. Abd Al-Razziq was deemed a terror risk, which immediately blocked all assets he has that are reachable by the U.S. government. The...

In the hunt for Saddam Hussein's billions, investigators have identified five networks of more than 100 companies used to launder money skimmed from Iraqi oil sales. Saddam's gangster regime set up shell companies in Switzerland, Jordan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Panama, according to investigators. Those company networks and their banking affiliations were used to enrich the former Iraqi strongman, his sons Uday and Qusay, and other family members. "Ultimately, the money was stolen from the Iraqi people," said Taylor Griffin, spokesman for the Treasury Department, which is heading the government's laundering probe along with U.S. Customs, the Secret Service and various...

Recent reports outlining what Time magazine has called the "untold story" of a cancelled al Qaeda plot against the New York subway system have excited considerable media hype and public consternation. The account is part of Ron Suskind's new book, The One Percent Doctrine, that was excerpted in the June 26 edition of Time. According to Suskind, al Qaeda developed a "revolutionary new WMD device" that would generate cyanide gas, and these weapons -- which he refers to as "mubtakkar" devices -- were to have been planted on subways by operatives who were in place and preparing to act in...

Nancy Soderberg, a former Ambassador to the United Nations and Foreign Policy Advisor under the Clinton administration, repeated the often-heard myth that President Clinton prevented Millennium attacks on the United States. Soderberg made the debunked claim as a guest on tonight's episode of The O'Reilly Factor (Thursday, February 9, 2006).Soderberg's claim would refer to the arrest of terrorist Ahmed Ressam at the U.S-Canada border on December 14, 1999. It was later learned that Ressam planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on or around New Year's Day 2000. Clinton defenders have often falsely cited this incident as evidence that...