Kerry Booed at Redsox Game

BOSTON - It's not exactly President Bush's surprise flight to Baghdad before Thanksgiving, but John Kerry redirected his flight tonight to Boston to catch the Red Sox-Yankees Game at Fenway Park and to add a little excitement to the Democratic nominating convention that begins tomorrow.

"We're going to the Yankees-Red Sox game. Right now. This is true," Mr. Kerry told reporters on his campaign plane, telling them he couldn't stand to miss a crucial game between the die-hard rivals.

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The boos about equaled the applause when Mr. Kerry was introduced at the game and it's still unclear what the surprise visit will do to his support in New York.

Hezbollah Kept Tabs on Three 9/11 Hijackers

WASHINGTON -- Several months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, it appears, the Iranian-sponsored terrorist organization Hezbollah was shadowing three of the hijackers as they flew from Saudi Arabia to Lebanon and onward to Iran.

Could Iran have had an inkling of the pending disaster?

Probably not, concludes the 9/11 commission in its final report yesterday. But it details a web of circumstantial evidence suggesting that the arrival and departure of three hijackers in November 2000 was of keen interest to Hezbollah and urges "further investigation by the U.S. Government."

"Hezbollah officials in Beirut and Iran were expecting the arrival of a group during the same time period," says the commission document, citing three intelligence reports prepared shortly after the attacks. "The travel of this group was important enough to merit the attention of senior figures in Hezbollah."

The intelligence reports apparently do not identify the group that so interested Hezbollah, but the commission concludes that it would be a "remarkable coincidence" if it was not the future hijackers.

In addition, the commission noted, an associate of a "senior Hezbollah operative" was on the same Beirut-to-Tehran flight as the three al-Qaida hijackers.

al Jazeera Broadcasting From the Democratic National Convention

It's been called everything from the CNN of the Arab world to Taliban TV.

Next week, though, the controversial Al-Jazeera network will for the first time at a political convention take its place alongside other major networks in a skybox, providing live coverage of the Democratic National Convention from the FleetCenter.

"We're basically just a bunch of hard-working people of every ethnic background, working very hard like everyone else in the news business,'' Washington-based Al-Jazeera producer Stephanie Thomas told the Herald.

Critics have charged that the Qatar-based network is a mouthpiece for Osama bin Laden because it has aired several unedited videos of the terrorist leader that some say could be spreading deadly messages to al-Qaeda sleeper cells. Adding fuel to the anti-American criticism is the network's airing of gruesome beheadings of captured Americans and others.

Thomas said the criticism is unfair.

"We're a news organization. We cover both sides of a news story,'' she said. "I don't think anyone would deny that (a tape of) Osama bin Laden is newsworthy.''

CIA Says It Has Spies in al Qaida

WASHINGTON -- The CIA has intelligence agents inside Osama bin Laden's Al-Qaeda network -- as it did before the Sept. 11 attacks -- but they are not within the terrorist leader's inner circle, where key information about any future attack would be discussed, a senior intelligence official said Friday.

"They are beyond foot soldiers but not in the inner circle," the official said. The agents -- Afghans, Pakistanis, Uzbeks and others recruited and run by CIA case officers -- "are more senior than the agents (the U.S. had) three years ago who were on the periphery," the official said.

Aided by these agents, electronic intercepts, satellite imagery, and extensive help from foreign intelligence services, the United States over the past two years has captured or killed two-thirds of bin Laden's top aides and broken up plots against U.S. embassies, U.S. and foreign aircraft, and ships and other targets worldwide.

Although the U.S. intelligence community believes that Al-Qaeda today is far less capable than the team that put together the Sept. 11 attacks, bin Laden "looks to the United States still as the brass ring," another senior intelligence official said.

"They still want to continue to attack us in the ways they did three years ago," he said during a Wednesday briefing, which was held on condition that reporters not disclose his name or the identity of two other senior intelligence officials who spoke.

This is the first time that CIA officials have publicly described with such specificity the placing of agents and other steps aimed at cracking Al-Qaeda -- the sort of information that the agency generally guards very closely.

al Qaida Threatens Australia

A GROUP calling itself al-Qaeda's European branch threatened today to turn Australia into "pools of blood" if it did not withdraw its troops from Iraq, a direct result of the Philippines decision to do so, says Foreign Minister Alexander Downing.

The online threat was the second statement in a week by the Tawhid Islamic Group, a previously unknown group which on Wednesday threatened attacks in Bulgaria and Poland if their troops remained in the Arab country.

"We call upon you to leave Iraq before your country turns to pools of blood," the statement warned the Australian Government.

"We will shake the earth under your feet as we did in Indonesia, and lines of car bombs will not cease, God willing."

That was a reference to the 2002 Bali bombing that killed 202 people - many of them Australian - and was blamed on the al-Qaeda-linked Jemaah Islamiyah.

The Tawhid statement also warned Italy to comply with an earlier warning.

"We advise you to accept our offer and if you don't, you will see the lines of cars laden with explosives hit your towns and turn your nights to mornings, God willing. We swear you will see hell with your eyes."