Tourist Copters in New York City a Terror Target
New York Times

ASHINGTON, Aug. 8 - Pakistan has given American officials what they regard as credible and specific information indicating that Al Qaeda has considered using tourist helicopters in terror attacks in New York City, domestic security officials said Sunday.

As a result, the officials said, security measures for helicopter operators in New York City will be stepped up in a new directive as early as this week. Among the new measures under review is a requirement for operators to conduct airport-style screenings of passengers for suspicious items, said an official with the Department of Homeland Security who had been briefed on the plan. So far, no groundings of helicopter operators are planned.

Personnel at several Manhattan helicopter charter companies said Sunday that although they had already conducted varying degrees of passenger screening themselves, they had heard of no specific safety concerns in recent days from the federal government.

Separately, a senior American intelligence official said that more than 1,000 computer disks had been seized by British authorities during arrests last week of 12 suspected operatives for Al Qaeda in England.

The seized files are now being subjected to intensive analysis by British and American intelligence, but they appear to contain evidence of previously unknown terrorist planning activities in the United States, the official said. As a result, Bush administration officials are preparing for the possibility of expanded public and private threat alerts.

The senior official, who has been briefed on the information from Britain and Pakistan, would not discuss specific operations that were emerging from the new computer data, saying that the evaluation of the material was still under way.

Focus : Adnan Gulshair el Shukrijumah
IanLivingston.Com

Disclosure in the age of terrorism
CNN

Battling terrorism on the home front could forever be tangled up in politics, but what if it weren't?

Suppose it were up to the antiterrorism pros alone to decide when to warn the public, what to say about the source of their intelligence and the actions the government is taking to neutralize the threat. Is there an obvious way to handle the sudden evidence that terrorists have plans to strike?

Probably not. Few people could disagree last week with the Bush Administration's decision to alert workers in New York City that their buildings had been cased. But there's less of a consensus, including in more terrorism-prone places like Israel and France, about whether U.S. officials should be forthcoming about how they came by that intelligence and what exactly they are doing about it.

"To publish or not to publish -- this is the dilemma of the intelligence officer every day, every minute," says Colonel Yossi Daskal, a retired head of the terrorism section of Israeli military intelligence.

Israeli security officials believe that in going public, the U.S. was relying on a strategy that agencies employ when they lose the intelligence contact, to use the term of art. That happens when sleuths collect enough leads to be pretty sure something's up but not enough to know precisely what's coming or when. Publicizing the information not only gives targeted populations warning but could also cause the attackers -- who may think intelligence officials are closer than they really are -- to abandon their plans.

The Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, doesn't generally publicize threats unless it has solid evidence of an impending strike. When the Palestinian uprising began in 2000, Shin Bet initially tried to keep information about imminent attacks secret.

AP : U.S. Didn't Warn Las Vegas of Threats
My Way News

WASHINGTON (AP) - A year after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department obtained video surveillance tapes suggesting terrorists were targeting Las Vegas casinos but authorities never alerted the public as they discussed whether a warning might hurt tourism or increase the casinos' legal liability, internal memos show.

The mayor of Las Vegas said Monday he was never told about the tapes uncovered in Detroit and Spain in 2002, and had been assured by the FBI there were no credible threats against his city. "If I were told, I would certainly tell the public," Mayor Oscar Goodman said.

But memos and e-mails between federal prosecutors, obtained by The Associated Press, say Las Vegas authorities were alerted to some of the footage by Aug. 30, 2002. Later, numerous local law enforcement officials were invited by a senior FBI agent to view the footage, but most spurned the invitation, the memos say.

One document quotes a federal prosecutor in Las Vegas as saying the mayor was concerned about the "deleterious effect on the Las Vegas tourism industry" if the Detroit evidence became public. Another memo states the casinos didn't want to see the footage for fear it would make them more likely to be held liable in civil court if an attack occurred.

One of the tapes, found in Spain, shows al-Qaida's European operatives casing Las Vegas casinos in 1997, engaging in casual conversation that included an apparent reference to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Sept. 11, 2001, mastermind. The tape was sent to al-Qaida's leadership to help in the selection of targets, documents show.

The documents state the two tapes include footage of the MGM Grand, Excalibur and New York, New York casinos - three hotels within a short distance of each other on the Las Vegas strip with a combined total of 11,000 rooms.

Video Shows Beheading, Victim Said to Be Bulgarian
AP Via TBO

CAIRO, Egypt (AP) - Militants who said they belong to a group that has claimed responsibility for kidnappings and killings in Iraq beheaded a man identified only as a Bulgarian in a video posted on the Internet Monday.

It was not clear when the video was made and its authenticity could not immediately be verified. Bulgarian officials said Monday they had examined the video but were "unable to identify the executed man because of the material's bad quality."

The militants in the video said they were from the Tawhid and Jihad group, which had claimed to have kidnapped two Bulgarian truck drivers June 29 and demanded Iraqi detainees be released in exchange for their lives.

The beheaded body of one of the drivers, Georgi Lazov, was found in the Tigris River in Iraq in mid July and a tape was released showing his death. An announcement late last month of the discovery of a second decapitated body in an orange jumpsuit and a head in a bag near the Tigris River had prompted fears Kepov too had been killed, but there was no video of his slaying.

The Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said Monday that it had no reliable information on Kepov's fate and that it was still awaiting results from a DNA analysis of the second body found. Previous Web statements signed Tawhid and Jihad had threatened to kill Kepov as well and post images of the killing on the Internet.

"Led by our principle not to become a tool in terrorists' hands and by our deep respect for the feelings of the hostages' relatives, we will not comment further on the video material," the Bulgarian Foreign Ministry said in a statement.

Price of oil surges to another record
The Globa and Mail

Calgary — The price of oil surged to a new high Monday, nearly cracking through the $45 (U.S.) mark, as a production slowdown in southern Iraq and deepening woes for troubled Russian energy giant OAO Yukos intensified concerns about global crude supplies.

“It's fear,” said analyst Kyle Cooper of Citigroup Global Markets Inc. “It's the same fear that has gripped the market for the past year or so. I don't believe current levels are sustainable but I don't know what changes [the situation]. How do you predict and judge mass psychology?”

Oil hit $44.98 a barrel early Monday afternoon before ending the day at $44.84, up 89 cents or 2 per cent. It was a record close for light crude's benchmark futures contract on the New York Mercantile Exchange since it began trading in 1983 — but, adjusted for inflation, oil today remains about half its all-time highs hit in the early 1980s.

Fear of supply disruptions dominated Monday's news. In Iraq, Southern Oil Co. halted production following threats from insurgent militias of attacks on oil facilities. A production halt in southern Iraq is problematic because the region essentially has no storage facilities, meaning that if oil is not pumping, nothing gets exported.