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Politics : America Under Siege: The End of Innocence -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (19731)	11/8/2002 9:32:41 AM
From: lorne	Respond to of 27666

GEOSTRATEGY-DIRECT INTELLIGENCE BRIEF Saudi 'payoffs' to bin Laden documented CIA says royal family faces 'increasingly open challenges to its control'' November 7, 2002 Authorities in Saudi Arabia paid cash to terrorist leader Osama bin Laden in the late 1990s, according to intelligence sources. The money was traced from a bank in the kingdom to accounts run by Osama outside of Saudi Arabia. The cash was intended as "payoffs" to bin Laden, who in the early 1990s was stripped of Saudi citizenship because of his backing for Islamist terrorism in Saudi Arabia. U.S. officials said the payments were not intended as support for bin Laden's activities but were used as a payoff for al-Qaida not to conduct operations against the Saudi royal family. The amounts are said to have been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars but the exact figure could not be learned. The current status of the Saudi funding is not known but U.S. officials said they believe the funding stopped after al-Qaida's attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998. The payments were similar to other cash payments made covertly to other terrorist groups with the aim of preventing attacks on Saudi leaders. A CIA report to Congress made public last month stated that the Saudi royal family is facing "increasingly open challenges to its control." "These include opposition from disparate elements hostile to the Al Saud [family] and the U.S. military presence, lack of job creation, a rapidly growing population and over reliance on oil income for government budget revenues," the report said. One senior intelligence official said the kingdom's future is not bright and that the royal family could be ousted within five years. worldnetdaily.com

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (19731)	11/8/2002 12:27:53 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

No, Darren, I am not trusting, especially not with this Islamist craziness in the ascendancy (a movement that should be thought of as being as much political as religous). I just know more of history, and take a longer view. There are tolerant versions of Islam that are traditional in Turkey, India, Indonesia, and even to a lesser extent in the Arab lands. The kind of Islam we are hearing about is not traditional; it is Saudi Wahabbism with a new infusion of totalitarianism, and it's got Saudi money proselytizing it.

To: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck who wrote (19731)	11/8/2002 2:39:14 PM
From: lorne	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 27666

U.S. Nabs 179 at Borders Under Post-Sept 11 Rules November 07, 2002 04:33 PM ET BUFFALO, New York (Reuters) - U.S. border agents have arrested 179 people under rules adopted on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks that mandate the fingerprinting of travelers requiring visas, U.S. Attorney-General John Ashcroft said on Thursday. Ashcroft told reporters at the U.S.-Canada border overlooking Niagara Falls that those arrested were felons who fled the United States after committing an offense on a previous visit, people with a serious criminal record or those attempting to enter the country under false pretenses. He said that before Sept. 11, "our borders did not have an efficient system to protect us from enemies treading on American soil" and that the new program tracked the whereabouts of people going in and out of the United States. Under the system, a visitor is fingerprinted when he arrives at a U.S. land, air or sea port. The print is then matched against the FBI's criminal and other wanted-persons databases and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service database of suspected terrorists. "For the first time we have an understanding of when people enter or exit," Ashcroft said. He said the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System could be applied to find nonresidents "who may pose an elevated security risk" and register them. Ashcroft said of 14,000 people checked under the new system throughout the United States, 179 from 112 countries had been arrested. The new rules generated controversy in Canada, where the government pressured Washington to exempt Canadians born in Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Sudan from being fingerprinted and photographed before entering the United States. Washington has placed those five countries on a list of those it accuses of supporting terrorism. The new fingerprinting system was primarily designed to keep track of the movements of people from those five countries, but Ashcroft said on Thursday that in terms of the origin of visitors, no country was exempt. Canada immediately said it would seek a clarification of his remarks, which seemed to fly in the face of earlier assurances that Canadians born in the five countries would be largely exempt from the new rules. "If you start checking everybody because they are from a certain ethnic group it's going to slow down the border, it's going to go against everything we've worked for," said Herb Dhaliwal, Canada's Indian-born energy minister. "Frankly most Canadians and Americans would feel it's an affront to do it on the basis of the way you look, the basis of your ethnicity or the basis of your race, and that's why I've said racial profiling is totally unacceptable," he told reporters in Ottawa. reuters.com