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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (184969)	3/17/2004 12:24:23 PM
From: tejek	Respond to of 1576807

Madrid suspects were known years ago MADRID (AP) — Long before Jamal Zougam was picked up as a suspect in the Madrid bombings, he'd flitted across the radar screens of anti-terrorism investigators. Police knew his apartment — they searched it in 2001. And both he and his half brother, also under arrest, reportedly had been vouched for by an al-Qaeda suspect in a monitored phone call. But as with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the United States, only after death and destruction had been unleashed did such tidbits of intelligence gleaned long ago about the suspects start to jigsaw into a coherent picture. In Spain, questions already are being asked about whether security agents failed to connect dots that might have enabled them to prevent the terrorists from placing shrapnel-packed bombs on rush-hour trains, killing 201 people. The investigation into Thursday's attack is focusing on a web of suspected ties to indicted and convicted Islamic radicals that radiate from Zougam, a Moroccan phone salesman. Spanish and Moroccan officials already suspected he was deeply involved in the netherworld of al-Qaeda and its offshoots. Zougam was arrested with his half brother, Mohamed Chaoui, and another Moroccan, Mohamed Bekkali, just two days after Thursday's bombings. However, both Zougam and Chaoui caught the attention of Spanish anti-terror Judge Baltasar Garzon as early as 2001, according to an Associated Press review of court documents and a French private investigator with access to Garzon's massive dossier on al-Qaeda operations in Spain. But in the fight against terrorists, knowing your enemy doesn't always mean you can stop him from acting. The fruits of globalization — easier travel across borders, quick, cheap and accessible means of communicating — are the same tools terrorists use to slip through cracks. Mobile phones and e-mail accounts can be used once, then discarded to prevent electronic snooping by intelligence agencies. Terrorists who need to travel can tap the lucrative black market in forged travel documents. "They know to create layers and layers of anonymity in the way they communicate," said Magnus Ranstorp, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University in Scotland. "They are very well versed in staying beneath the intelligence radar screen," he added. The Madrid bombers appear to have succeeded in keeping their deadly intentions hidden. A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said authorities found no evidence of increased "chatter" — monitored contacts between suspects that might have pointed to a plot — in the days prior to the attack. While police and intelligence agencies' databases are stuffed with the names of suspects and radicals trained in al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, investigators can't keep tabs on them all — despite money and manpower that has been poured into beefing up intelligence gathering since the Sept. 11 attacks. usatoday.com