We Must be Watchful
Trinidad & Tobago Express

The central reason advanced for the setting-up of a Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) office is the ongoing search for a top Al Qaeda terrorist suspect, Adnan El Shukrijumah, who lived in Trinidad after the search began for him last year.

The US Embassy in Port of Spain has confirmed that an FBI Special Agent is already in this country setting up the operations to service Trinidad and Tobago as well as Suriname and Guyana where El Shukrijumah is also believed to have found refuge.

The disclosed information is that the FBI Office here will focus on exchanging information on criminal terrorist activities between the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, Suriname and Guyana with the Bureau also being involved in training local law enforcement officers to better fight crime and terrorism.

The Trinidad office will be the FBI's 53rd office, or legat, in a foreign country since the FBI believes "it is essential to station highly skilled agents in other countries to help prevent terrorism and crime from reaching across borders and harming Americans in their homes and in workplaces."

It stands to reason, however, that the FBI would not set about setting up a branch office, as it were, in a foreign country in the absence of evidence that there was some thing or some person in that country that presented a threat of some kind.

Terror - Targeting Britain
Newsweek Periscope

American and British investigators say they have strong evidence that terror suspects recently collared in Pakistan and England -- linked to the latest terror alert -- were preparing to attack in Britain. But they have little proof that the suspects were preparing to hit targets in the U.S. Intelligence reports allege that Dhiren Barot, a suspected British Qaeda fixer also known as Esa Al-Hindi, visited Pakistan last winter and may have met with other Qaeda operatives. During such meetings, investigators fear, Barot, one of eight men charged in London last week with terrorist conspiracy (defense lawyers said the charges would be "fully contested"), may have shared info from surveillances of financial buildings in New York, New Jersey and Washington, D.C., which authorities believe Barot and two associates cased before 9/11. But most of the evidence so far indicates that Barot and his alleged cohorts were actively preparing to attack only British targets. U.S. security officials say they must assume that plotting could be underway by Qaeda sleepers in the U.S. -- perhaps using the surveillance reports written by the Barot group. But if terrorists connected to the accused British conspirators are preparing an attack in the U.S., authorities have no idea who -- or where -- they are.

U.S. Probe Finds Al- Qaeda Travel Agency
Turkish Press

WASHINGTON, Aug 22 (AFP) - Al-Qaeda runs a clandestine travel service, possibly partnered with human smugglers south of the US border, which helps move its terrorists around the world, according to results of a probe published here.

The national commission that investigated the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States disclosed its findings in a new report released over the weekend as its final act before formally disbanding.

"There are uncorroborated law enforcement reports suggesting that associates of Al-Qaeda used smugglers in Latin America to travel through the region in 2002, before traveling onward to the United States," the panel said, without offering specifics.

The disclosure comes as several key financial and government institutions in New York, New Jersey and Washington, including International Monetary Fund and World Bank headquarters, remain on heightened security alert, following reports that suspected terrorists were casing the buildings early this year.

The US Border Patrol has also begun using pilotless "Predator" aircraft to patrol the Arizona stretch of the US border with Mexico, where human smuggling has been rampant for decades.

So far, however, only one human smuggler, known as Salim Boughader-Mucharafille, a Tijuana restaurateur, has been tried, convicted and sentenced. He was found guilty of helping at least 80 Lebanese nationals to cross the US-Mexican border into California since late 1999 and was sentenced to 11 months in jail.

Egyptian cleric warns US of Najaf fallout
Al-Jazeera

In a statement on Saturday, Ali Gumaa, the mufti of Egypt and the country's highest authority on Islamic law, condemned the "continuing aggression by US-led forces on the Imam Ali shrine and Islamic holy places" in Iraq.

"After the attack on the shrines of the Prophet's noble companions, after the humiliations and the terrorizing and killing of civilians, the world cannot expect… that a volcano of anger and indignation will not explode," Gumaa said.

Gumaa is second in the Islamic hierarchy only to the shaikh of al-Azhar, Cairo's ancient university and institute of religious learning.

Iran to build more nuclear reactors
The Hindu

Tehran, Aug. 22. (AP): Brushing aside U.S. accusations that it wants to build atomic weapons, Iran said Sunday it has contracted Russia to build more nuclear power plants, while claiming two European countries have also expressed interest in helping construct similar facilities.

Russia is currently rebuilding Iran's first nuclear reactor, which was begun by West Germany but interrupted during the 1979 Islamic revolution. Damage caused to the facility in Bushehr, a coastal town in southern Iran, during the 1980-88 war with Iraq has also led to its inauguration being postponed from 2003 to August 2006.

Despite the delays and the project's US$800 million (649 million) cost, Iranian nuclear officials say they want Russia to build more nuclear reactors to help generate greater amounts of electricity.

"We have contracts with Russia to build more nuclear reactors. No number has been specified but definitely our contract with Russia is to build more than one nuclear power plant," Asadollah Sabouri, deputy head of the Atomic Energy Organization of Iran in charge of nuclear power plants, told reporters Sunday.

Iran denies developing missiles capable of reaching US
Xinhuanet.Com

TEHRAN, Aug. 22 (Xinhuanet) -- Iran on Sunday dismissed US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's allegation that Tehran may be working to develop missiles capable of reaching the United States, the official IRNA news agency reported.

"Acquiring missiles which could have a range up to America is a new issue which we hear," Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid-Reza Asefi was quoted by the agency as saying.

"Such a program is not on our agenda and this propaganda of certain American officials is only for media consumption," he said.

Neo-Nazis in Paris Vandalize and Burn a Jewish Community Center
New York Times

PARIS, Aug. 22 - Fire swept through a Jewish community center in eastern Paris in the early morning hours on Sunday after arsonists broke into the building and scrawled swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans inside. It was the latest in a wave of neo-Nazi acts across the country.

The community center, which prepares kosher food for needy Jews, occupies the ground floor of a five-story residential building. There were no casualties.

President Jacques Chirac and other politicians were quick to issue statements condemning the attack and vowing to find and punish those who carried it out. The Paris mayor, Bertrand Delanoë, visited the scene on Sunday and said he felt "shock and horror."

The attack comes at a particularly sensitive time for the city, falling between two emotional anniversaries. On Aug. 18, 1944, the Red Cross entered a Nazi detention camp outside Paris, freeing about 1,500 Jews who were awaiting deportation to death camps in Germany. A week later, Paris itself was liberated from the Nazis.

Much of the neo-Nazi activity in France this year has been concentrated in the eastern region of Alsace, traditionally a German-speaking area along the German border. Officials there say Alsace's neo-Nazi movement is an extension of a broader movement in Germany. On Saturday, about 3,000 people took part in a neo-Nazi march in the German town of Wunsiedel, about 250 miles from Alsace, to commemorate the death, in 1987, of Hitler's deputy Rudolf Hess.

More than a dozen neo-Nazi acts have taken place across France this year, in some cases by lone copycats with no clear relationship to an organized movement.

Severed heads and the Arab world's foul predicament
The Daily Star

"My blood flowed on the pavement. The head had separated from the body as though it had been chopped off by a sharp sword. I was sorry to see my body lying on the macadam only to be run over by some truck or lorry. I tried to order my hands to lift the corpse but soon realized that they were no longer subject to my command. The veins and arteries were gushing a jet fountain, spurts of blood spreading out, perhaps aspiring toward the final form of (a) red pool."

So begins Mohammed Barrada's intentionally disturbing tale, "The Story of the Severed Head." Before its adventures are over, Barrada's severed head will take flight and deliver a politically subversive message to an astonished populace: You may take solace in fantasies, the head tells its listeners, but those fantasies are the source of your oppression. Eventually, the head will be captured and finally judged by a ghost. First published in 1979, this short, surrealistic work by the distinguished Moroccan author and teacher has lately taken on an unexpected and unhappy contemporary resonance.

Of course, the most obvious source of the story's renewed timeliness is the severed head itself. Originally a device intended by Barrada to evoke antique horrors for his modern Arab readers, it may now evoke instead the disgust of daily reality. Beheadings or threats of beheadings are in the news almost every day, thanks to murderers who are acting in the name of Islamist political fantasies. Headless bodies are found floating in the Tigris River, and bodiless heads are discovered in Saudi refrigerators. Videotaped beheadings may be watched at any time on the internet, their appalling images overwhelming Barrada's or anyone else's attempts to capture their savagery in words. Barrada's quarter-century-old political horror story is now our daily reality.

Yet Barrada's bizarre tale is not timely merely because of the rise of beheadings as a tactic of terror and revulsion. Rather, this literary severed head lies at an intersection of terrible cultural and political forces in the Arab world, forces that not only shape the story's message of personal and political fantasy, but that may also underlie the story's own origins.

Arab literary fantasy is a remarkable phenomenon. Despite the flights of grand imagination for which the Arab folktale and epic are justly famous, fantasy remained rare in modern Arabic prose literature until quite late. While such important authors as Yusuf Idris and Naguib Mahfouz did make use of fantastic elements in their writing, especially in their short works, the great majority of Arab novelists remained faithful to the established tradition of social realism.

In the late 1960s, however, this situation changed dramatically: An explosion of Arab prose tales employing the fantastic, the surreal and the marvelous became apparent.