THE NEW YORK TIMES BELONGS IN JAIL

Finally, some good may come from the Valerie Plame kerfuffle — if President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez have the stones to do what’s right.

A grave crime was exposed Dec. 16th when New York Times reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau published a story revealing President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to listen in on conversations between al Qaeda suspects abroad and people in the United States without first obtaining a warrant.

"We’re seeing clearly now that (President) Bush thought 9/11 gave him license to act like a dictator," wrote Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter. But the scandal was (more…)

WHICH SIDE IS CONGRESS – AND JOHN MCCAIN – ON?

There hasn’t been a successful terrorist attack in the United States since Sep. 11th, 2001. Congress may be about to change that.

Several critical provisions of the Patriot Act will expire at the end of the year, because a Democratic filibuster in the U.S. Senate blocked their renewal. Without these provisions, the FBI will lose most of its ability to track terrorists, the head of the FBI’s national security division told the Washington Times.

The most important of these provisions is for roving wiretaps, said Gary Bald. "We’ve had that capability for years on the drug side of the ship (more…)

A SUCKER’S GAME

The French just arrested 20 people, apparently pretty close to doing some mean terrorist thing. In late September, nine people were arrested in Paris in "what officials said was a crackdown on suspected Islamic terrorist activities." It was later reported that the DST (internal-security service) had learned that members of this group had been trained in Lebanon, and possessed an exotic poison: seeds of the "nigelle" plant, said to be highly lethal.

At the end of October, the London Telegraph reported that French authorities had discovered that "an Islamic terror cell has smuggled two surface-to-air missiles into Europe in (more…)

WIRELESS PIRATES

Recently I had the pleasure of being a passenger in a friend’s car. We were touring the city (Jerusalem) on the way to a wonderful village on the outskirts – Ein Kerem. That’s another story; I’m not a good tour guide.

Having seen all the sites on the way many times, I had my laptop out. I started playing with my laptop’s built in wireless network detector. This nifty little feature, as users of wireless networks know, scans the area for networks you can connect to, and lets you connect to the network, if possible.

While setting up a wireless (more…)

THE CIA IN DEEP CRISIS

On August 2nd, Dafna Linzer of the Washington Post reported that: "A major U.S. intelligence review has projected that Iran is about a decade away from manufacturing the key ingredient for a nuclear weapon, roughly doubling the previous estimate of five years."

On December 5th, the Jerusalem Post reported that Mohammed el Baradei, chairman of the International Atomic Energy Agency, "confirmed Israel’s assessment that Iran is only a few months away from creating an atomic bomb.

"My, how time flies. It hasn’t seemed as if ten years have elapsed since last summer.

The CIA could be right, and Mossad and (more…)