British Terror Head: "Be a little bit un-British and inform on each other"

Patrick Hennessy
London Telegraph
Sunday July 8, 2007

Britain faces a 15-year battle to end the threat posed by Islamist terrorists, the Government's new security supremo has admitted.

Admiral Sir Alan West, the former First Sea Lord, said the overall danger facing the country, from both home-grown and foreign terrorists, was at its greatest ever level and that a new approach was badly needed to tackle it.

In his first interview since his surprise appointment by Gordon Brown as security minister, Sir Alan called on people to be "a little bit un-British" and even inform on each other in an attempt to trap those plotting to take innocent lives.

"Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone," he said. "I'm afraid, in this situation, anyone who's got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life."

He said he was determined to build on the Government's core anti-terrorism strategy of the "four Ps" - prepare, protect, pursue, prevent - but that the "prevent" side, dealing with the radicalisation of young Muslims, was the most important.

"This is not a quick thing," he said. "I believe it will take 10 to 15 years. But I think it can be done as long as we as a nation apply ourselves to it and it's done across the board."

Sir Alan gave his comprehensive assessment of the threat facing the country to The Sunday Telegraph following last weekend's car bomb attacks in London and Glasgow.

Yesterday, Bilal Abdullah, a 27-year-old doctor, was remanded in custody at Westminster magistrates' court on a charge of conspiring to cause explosions in connection with the Glasgow attack last Saturday.

At King's Cross, Mr Brown joined survivors and relatives of victims to commemorate the second anniversary of the July 7 bombings in London, while there were reports that up to eight police officers and civilian staff in Britain were suspected of having links to al-Qaeda.

The Sunday Telegraph can also reveal that Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former director general of MI5, has disclosed that there are now more than 100 suspects awaiting trial across the country in 40 terrorist-related cases and warned of the possibility of an imminent chemical or biological bomb attack.

Sir Alan said that, after little more than a week in the job, it was clear to him that the overall threat had increased since he left his Navy post 16 months ago. He said: "There is a greater threat than there was."

Britain was now fighting "a disparate core of people - based abroad primarily - whom I'm afraid are racist, they're bigoted, they seek power, they're avaricious in money terms and they talk of the caliphate." He said that he had been asked by Mr Brown shortly before he took over from Tony Blair to "sort out" the Government's response to the terror threat. "We are not getting our message across properly," Sir Alan said.

The 59-year-old who was chosen by Mr Brown as a non-partisan figure, said he would work to achieve a political consensus "wherever" possible - but added that it was inevitable that "disagreements" between the parties and across Whitehall would cause difficulties.

The admiral, who has been given a far-reaching brief across all government departments, also launched an attack on the phrase "war on terror" - which has been abandoned by ministers since Mr Blair left office.

He said: "I hate that expression. When I first heard it - I think it came over from the States - I though it was totally the wrong thing. It's not like a war in that sense at all. It demeans the value of a war and it demeans the value of a lot of things.

"I don't like the fact that we talk about 'the Muslim community' and this sort of thing. I have a lot of Muslim friends and they see themselves as British. We've got to be very careful. The threat is to our British way of life and all of our British people."

Of the terrorists, he said: "I think they have severely damaged one of the world's great religions - the one they purport to support." The claims that British foreign policy was solely to blame was an erroneous argument, he said.

"It's not something that has happened recently. Iraq, for example, they use that as an excuse. There's no doubt the Middle East peace process is an important issue but actually when we were having men killed fighting to look after Muslims in Bosnia and in Kosovo, these people even then were trying to undermine us and ... cause damage to us."

He said he was in favour of giving the security services more money and staff "if there is a need for that".

Sir Alan, who will become a Labour life peer, was commander of the frigate Ardent in the Falklands in 1982. The ship was sunk with a loss of 22 crew. In 2002, he became First Sea Lord and Chief of the Naval Staff. While in the post he became a fierce critic of the Government's naval cutbacks.

Sir Alan said he had been "amazed" to be offered a ministerial job by Mr Brown and had taken a "considerable drop in money". When he marched out of No 10 alongside Jacqui Smith, the new Home Secretary, few if anybody knew who he was.

He said he had a text message from a Royal Marines general, a friend serving in Afghanistan and watching a television link, to ask if he had "become a bodyguard."

Brown wants international terror register

Jeremy Lovell
Reuters
Sunday July 8, 2007

Prime Minister Gordon Brown said on Sunday he wanted a central register of known or suspected terrorists so that information could be shared internationally.

He spoke as his new Security Minister Admiral Alan West warned the defeat of militant radicalism could take up to 15 years, and urged people to become informers.

"If there is information in one country about the potential recruitment or the actual recruitment of someone to a terrorist group then that should be information that is flowing to other countries," Brown told Sky News.

Britain remains on its second highest alert level more than a week after two failed car bomb attacks in central London's theatre and nightclub district and two men smashed a car into the main terminal at Scotland's busy Glasgow airport and set it ablaze.

The attacks came days after Brown took over as prime minister from Tony Blair and were seen in some quarters as a direct challenge to his authority.

They also happened within hours of West taking up his new post as the country faces what security sources said is a proliferation of plots against it.

"This is not a quick thing. I believe it will take 10 to 15 years," West told the Sunday Telegraph newspaper. "But I believe it can be done as long as we as a nation apply ourselves to it and it's done across the board."

He urged Britons who had knowledge or suspicion of terrorist activities to inform the authorities.

"Britishness does not normally involve snitching or talking about someone. I'm afraid, in this situation, anyone who's got any information should say something because the people we are talking about are trying to destroy our entire way of life," he said.

On Saturday Iraqi doctor Bilal Abdulla, 27, was charged with conspiracy to cause explosions in connection with the London and Glasgow attacks.

Abdulla was arrested at Glasgow airport immediately after the fire attack.

He spoke only to confirm his name and address and will remain in high security jail until his next court appearance at Old Bailey on July 27.

Abdulla is the only person charged so far over the suspected al Qaeda-linked plot in which eight Middle Eastern and Indian medics have been arrested, seven in Britain and one in Australia.

On Saturday police were granted an extra seven days to question five of the suspects who are being held in London.

Under security laws police have a maximum of 28 days that they can hold a suspect without charge.

Another suspect Kafeel Ahmed, 27, has been in hospital with 90 percent burns since the Glasgow attack -- witnesses say he set both himself and the crashed vehicle ablaze.

On Saturday survivors and relatives of victims of four suicide bombers on the London transport system that killed 52 commuters and injured hundreds more on July 7, 2005 held a quiet ceremony to mark the second anniversary of the attacks.

Nuclear alert by ex-head of MI5

Sean Rayment
London Telegraph
Sunday July 8, 2007

More than 100 suspects are awaiting trial in British courts for terrorist offences - a figure unprecedented in modern criminal history - Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former spy chief, has revealed.

Britain is a centre of intense plotting and faces a terrorist threat of "unprecedented scale, ambition and ruthlessness".

In a stark warning for the future, Dame Eliza added: "It remains a very real possibility that they may, sometime, somewhere attempt a chemical biological, radiological or even nuclear attack".

The more than 40 separate terror court cases due to be heard include Operation Gamble, an alleged plot to kidnap and video the beheading of a British soldier and Operation Overt, an alleged plan to blow up 10 US airliners.

Only last week, Omar Altimimi, from Bolton, was jailed for nine years for terrorist-related offences. A further three men were sentenced to a total of 24 years in jail after they admitted inciting terrorist murder over the internet.

Dame Eliza, the former director-general of MI5, said the radicalisation of teenage Muslims "from first exposure, to extremism, to active participation in terrorist plotting" was now worryingly rapid.

It was vital that the Government rose to the challenge of trying to change the attitudes that "lead some of our young people to become terrorists".

Dame Eliza, writing in the periodical Policing: A Journal of Policing and Practice, said that 1,700 terrorists in 200 networks, "scattered across the country" are thought to be plotting 30 attacks at any one time.

She warned of the "pressing demand" for the police to create a secret network of Muslim spies capable of improving intelligence gathering.

In the article, drafted shortly before she left the service in April but published only last week, she went on: "In addition to these 200-plus networks and groupings now identified, there are sure to be others at large, which we have yet to uncover."

The former spy chief also warned that "it is inevitable that some terrorist plots will escape our combined attention," adding: "Even if we have the numbers of personnel engaged in looking at our own citizens as, say, the KGB or the Stasi did during the Cold War, and with the same authoritarian powers, some things would slip under the radar."

Dame Eliza, 59, now retired in the West Country after her 33 years with MI5, said it was almost inevitable that the search for terrorists within the Muslim community would lead to social tensions. But she said this "must not be allowed to deflect the police, nor the Security Services, from continuing the intelligence work which is necessary and proportionate to match the terrorist threat".

She warned of the difficulties of converting intelligence into evidence that would stand up in court. "This is rarely a straightforward endeavour," she writes. "There will continue to be occasions when we will have to act on credible threat intelligence but no charges will follow, and we will need to accept, and educate the public to accept, that this is an unavoidable consequence of the current threat."

Concluding the article, she called on both the police and MI5 to develop their relationship, which she said had created a counter-terrorist organisation "unmatched anywhere in the world".

U.S. Aborted Raid on Qaeda Chiefs in Pakistan in ’05

MARK MAZZETTI
NY Times
Sunday July 8, 2007

A secret military operation in early 2005 to capture senior members of Al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas was aborted at the last minute after top Bush administration officials decided it was too risky and could jeopardize relations with Pakistan, according to intelligence and military officials.

The target was a meeting of Qaeda leaders that intelligence officials thought included Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy and the man believed to run the terrorist group’s operations.

But the mission was called off after Donald H. Rumsfeld, then the defense secretary, rejected an 11th-hour appeal by Porter J. Goss, then the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, officials said. Members of a Navy Seals unit in parachute gear had already boarded C-130 cargo planes in Afghanistan when the mission was canceled, said a former senior intelligence official involved in the planning.

Mr. Rumsfeld decided that the operation, which had ballooned from a small number of military personnel and C.I.A. operatives to several hundred, was cumbersome and put too many American lives at risk, the current and former officials said. He was also concerned that it could cause a rift with Pakistan, an often reluctant ally that has barred the American military from operating in its tribal areas, the officials said.

The decision to halt the planned “snatch and grab” operation frustrated some top intelligence officials and members of the military’s secret Special Operations units, who say the United States missed a significant opportunity to try to capture senior members of Al Qaeda.

Their frustration has only grown over the past two years, they said, as Al Qaeda has improved its abilities to plan global attacks and build new training compounds in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which have become virtual havens for the terrorist network.

In recent months, the White House has become increasingly irritated with Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, for his inaction on the growing threat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.

About a dozen current and former military and intelligence officials were interviewed for this article, all of whom requested anonymity because the planned 2005 mission remained classified.

Spokesmen for the Pentagon, the C.I.A. and the White House declined to comment. It is unclear whether President Bush was informed about the planned operation.

The officials acknowledge that they are not certain that Mr. Zawahri attended the 2005 meeting in North Waziristan, a mountainous province just miles from the Afghan border. But they said that the United States had communications intercepts that tipped them off to the meeting, and that intelligence officials had unusually high confidence that Mr. Zawahri was there.

Months later, in early May 2005, the C.I.A. launched a missile from a remotely piloted Predator drone, killing Haitham al-Yemeni, a senior Qaeda figure whom the C.I.A. had tracked since the meeting.

It has long been known that C.I.A. operatives conduct counterterrorism missions in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Details of the aborted 2005 operation provide a glimpse into the Bush administration’s internal negotiations over whether to take unilateral military action in Pakistan, where General Musharraf’s fragile government is under pressure from dissidents who object to any cooperation with the United States.

Pentagon officials familiar with covert operations said that planners had to consider the political and human risks of undertaking a military campaign in a sovereign country, even in an area like Pakistan’s tribal lands, where the government has only tenuous control. Even with its shortcomings, Pakistan has been a vital American ally since the Sept. 11 attacks, and the militaries of the two countries have close ties.

The Pentagon officials said tension was inherent in any decision to approve such a mission: a smaller military footprint allows a better chance of a mission going undetected, but it also exposes the units to greater risk of being killed or captured.

Officials said one reason Mr. Rumsfeld called off the 2005 operation was that the number of troops involved in the mission had grown to several hundred, including Army Rangers, members of the Navy Seals and C.I.A. operatives, and he determined that the United States could no longer carry out the mission without General Musharraf’s permission. It is unlikely that the Pakistani president would have approved an operation of that size, officials said.

Some outside experts said American counterterrorism operations had been hamstrung because of concerns about General Musharraf’s shaky government.

“The reluctance to take risk or jeopardize our political relationship with Musharraf may well account for the fact that five and half years after 9/11 we are still trying to run bin Laden and Zawahri to ground,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University.

Those political considerations have created resentment among some members of the military’s Special Operations forces.

“The Special Operations guys are tearing their hair out at the highest levels,” said a former Bush administration official with close ties to those troops. While they have not received good intelligence on the whereabouts of top Qaeda members recently, he said, they say they believe they have sometimes had useful information on lower-level figures.

“There is a degree of frustration that is off the charts, because they are looking at targets on a daily basis and can’t move against them,” he said.

In early 2005, after learning about the Qaeda meeting, the military developed a plan for a small Navy Seals unit to parachute into Pakistan to carry out a quick operation, former officials said.

But as the operation moved up the military chain of command, officials said, various planners bulked up the force’s size to provide security for the Special Operations forces.

“The whole thing turned into the invasion of Pakistan,” said the former senior intelligence official involved in the planning. Still, he said he thought the mission was worth the risk. “We were frustrated because we wanted to take a shot,” he said.

Several former officials interviewed said the operation was not the only occasion since the Sept. 11 attacks that plans were developed to use a large American military force in Pakistan. It is unclear whether any of those missions have been executed.

Some of the military and intelligence officials familiar with the 2005 events say it showed a rift between operators in the field and a military bureaucracy that has still not effectively adapted to hunt for global terrorists, moving too cautiously to use Special Operations troops against terrorist targets.

That criticism has echoes of the risk aversion that the officials said pervaded efforts against Al Qaeda during the Clinton administration, when missions to use American troops to capture or kill Mr. bin Laden in Afghanistan were never executed because they were considered too perilous, risked killing civilians or were based on inadequate intelligence. Rather than sending in ground troops, the Clinton White House instead chose to fire cruise missiles in what became failed attempts to kill Mr. bin Laden and his deputies — a tactic Mr. Bush criticized shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Since then, the C.I.A. has launched missiles from Predator aircraft in the tribal areas several times, with varying degrees of success. Intelligence officials say they believe that in January 2006, an airstrike narrowly missed killing Mr. Zawahri, who hours earlier had attended a dinner in Damadola, a Pakistani village.

General Musharraf cast his lot with the Bush administration in the hunt for Al Qaeda after the 2001 attacks, and he has periodically ordered Pakistan’s military to conduct counterterrorism missions in the tribal areas, provoking fierce resistance there. But in recent months he has pulled back, prompting Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to issue stern warnings in private that he risked losing American aid if he did not step up efforts against Al Qaeda, senior administration officials have said.

Officials said that mid-2005 was a period when they were gathering good intelligence about Al Qaeda’s leaders in Pakistan’s tribal areas. By the next year, however, the White House had become frustrated by the lack of progress in the hunt for Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri.

In early 2006, President Bush ordered a “surge” of dozens of C.I.A. agents to Pakistan, hoping that an influx of intelligence operatives would lead to better information, officials said. But that has brought the United States no closer to locating Al Qaeda’s top two leaders. The latest message from them came this week, in a new tape in which Mr. Zawahri urged Iraqis and Muslims around the world to show more support for Islamist insurgents in Iraq.

In his recently published memoir, George J. Tenet, the former C.I.A. director, said the intelligence about Mr. bin Laden’s whereabouts during the Clinton years was similarly sparse. The information was usually only at the “50-60% confidence level,” he wrote, not sufficient to justify American military action.

“As much as we all wanted Bin Ladin dead, the use of force by a superpower requires information, discipline, and time,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “We rarely had the information in sufficient quantities or the time to evaluate and act on it.”

Iraq al-Qaida Group Threatens Iran

Iraq al-Qaida Group Threatens Iran

Leader of al-Qaida Front Group in Iraq Threatens War Against Iran

By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF

The Associated Press

CAIRO, Egypt

The leader of an al-Qaida umbrella group in Iraq threatened to wage war against Iran unless it stops supporting Shiites in Iraq within two months, according to an audiotape released Sunday.

Abu Omar al-Baghdadi, who leads the group Islamic State in Iraq, said his Sunni fighters have been preparing for four years to wage a battle against Shiite-dominated Iran.

"We are giving the Persians, and especially the rulers of Iran, a two month period to end all kinds of support for the Iraqi Shiite government and to stop direct and indirect intervention ... otherwise a severe war is waiting for you," he said in the 50-minute audiotape. The tape, which could not be independently verified, was posted on a Web site commonly used by insurgent groups.

Iraq's Shiite-led government is backed by the U.S. but closely allied to Iran. The United States accuses Iran of arming and financing Shiite militias in Iraq charges Tehran denies.

In the recording, al-Baghdadi also gave Sunnis and Arab countries doing business in Iran or with Iranians a two-month deadline to cease their ties.

"We advise and warn every Sunni businessman inside Iran or in Arab countries especially in the Gulf not to take partnership with any Shiite Iranian businessman this is part of the two-month period," he said.

Al-Baghdadi said his group was responsible for two suicide truck bomb attacks in May in Iraq's northern Kurdish region. He said the attacks in Irbil and Makhmur showed the "Islamic jihad," or holy war, was progressing in the Kurdish areas.

At least 14 people were killed when a suicide truck bomb struck a government building in Irbil, Kurdistan's capital, on May 9. Four days later in Makhmur, another suicide truck bomb tore through the offices of a Kurdish political party, killing 50 people.

In the recording, the Islamic State of Iraq leader did not mention Saturday's deadly truck bomb in Armili, a Shiite town north of Baghdad, which killed more than 100 people. The attack was among the deadliest this year in Iraq and reinforced suspicions that al-Qaida extremists were moving north to less protected regions beyond the U.S. security crackdown in Baghdad.

Al-Baghdadi criticized Kurdish leaders for their alliance with Shiites in Iraq's government and accused them encouraging unsavory morals.

"The leaders of apostasy ... have impeded the march of Islam in Muslim Kurdistan and helped communism and secularism to spread. ... They insulted the religious scholars ... encouraged vices and women without veils," he said.

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Brzezinski, Kissinger, et al, Shill Global Slave Plantation

Kurt Nimmo
Sunday July 8, 2007

Back on May 19, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch poked fun at the New World Order tinfoil hatters, that is to say those of us who understand what the global elite have in mind for the people of North America.

“Forget conspiracy theories about JFK’s assassination, black helicopters, Sept. 11, 2001. This is the big one,” the newspaper wrote, adding that a “rumor is sweeping the Internet, radio and magazines, spread by bloggers, broadcasters and writers who cite the ‘proof’ in the writings of a respected American University professor, in a task force put together by the Council on Foreign Relations and in the workings of the Commerce Department. As do many modern rumors, fears of a North American Union began with a few grains of truth and leapt to an unsubstantiated conclusion.”

As it turns out, these “few grains of truth” soon transmutated into a virtual silo of evidence, not that we should expect the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to publish a follow-up. A few days later, on May 24, WorldNetDaily reported: “A powerful think tank [the Center for Strategic & International Studies] chaired by former Sen. Sam Nunn and guided by trustees including Richard Armitage, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Harold Brown, William Cohen and Henry Kissinger, is in the final stages of preparing a report to the White House and U.S. Congress on the benefits of integrating the U.S., Mexico and Canada into one political, economic and security bloc.”

The momentarily defeated “comprehensive immigration reform” bill, i.e., illegal immigrant amnesty, contained “provisions for the acceleration of the Security and Prosperity Partnership, a plan for North American economic and defense integration with remarkable similarities to the CSIS plan,” similar because CSIS, its high profile globalists, and the elite coterie behind the SPP are on the same page, indeed they are working closely in a huddle, determined to reduce North America to a huge slave labor plantation, à la “communist” China.

“CSIS boasts of playing a large role in the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994—a treaty that set in motion a political movement many believe resembles the early stages of the European Community on its way to becoming the European Union.” NAFTA, of course, was designed to decimate the industrial base of the United States, now glaringly apparent in the fact the United States no longer manufactures anything of note, delegating that role to Chinese and Asian slaves locked down in sweatshops sixteen or more hours each and every day, cranking out baubles for “service economy” Americans, who eventually will be “harmonized” with Mexican peasants, that is if Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski have their way.

“In order to remain competitive in the global economy, it is imperative for the twenty-first century North American labor market to possess the flexibility necessary to meet industrial labor demands on a transitional basis and in a way that responds to market forces,” declares the CSIS report, actually a blueprint for feudalism. “It is the sense of Congress that the United States and Mexico should accelerate the implementation of the Partnership for Prosperity to help generate economic growth and improve the standard of living in Mexico, which will lead to reduced migration.”

In other words, come hell or high water, and contrary to the desire of the commoners, who want secure borders, the globalists are determined to have “open borders,” that is to say unhindered migration of slaves across borders, an effort designed to “accelerate the implementation” of poverty and misery here in the United States, soon enough to be merely the middle slice of the North American Union. Recall Alan Greenspan, former Federal Reserve head honcho and one-time objectivist, stating in March of this year that skilled American workers earn too much. “The hero of the corporatocrats and plutocrats wants to distribute your income into the hands of needy billionaires by using H-1B visa ’skilled workers’ to knock you off your haughty middle-class pedestal,” comments Dick Eastman of the Job Destruction Newsletter. “Our skilled wages are higher than anywhere in the world,” said Greenspan. “If we open up a significant window for skilled workers, that would suppress the skilled-wage level and end the concentration of income.”

Greenspan, of course, is not talking about the “concentration of income” held by transnational corporations and international bankers, but the mass of commoners who must be folded at all cost into the emerging corporatist global slave plantation. CSIS is not interested in improving the living standard of Mexicans, as this was knocked down a few pegs when NAFTA jobs went from Mexican slave maquiladoras to the sprawling labor gulag in China where workers are paid even less and a massive totalitarian state runs the shop. Mexicans are worse off now than they were ten years ago when NAFTA was in full swing.

Peter F. Drucker, writer and Habsburg empire factotum, “describes in his book [Post Capitalist Society, published in 1993] the worldwide trends toward globalization that were evident back then—the creation and empowerment of transnational organizations and institutions, international environmental goals regarding carbon dioxide and agreements to fight terrorism long before 9/11.” In short, none of this is new or should it be surprising, as the globalists have planned to reduce us to grinding peonage for some time now. Moreover, they have planned for some time to exploit the global warming scam to get us all working on the slave plantation, making sure to condition us first with a bit of terrorism.

Of course, in the brave new world envisioned by the decadent criminal elite, mere terrorism—raving jihadists, we are told ad nauseam, who want to dirty nuke our cities because they hate our freedom to shop—will pale in comparison to the dire scenarios of melting ice caps, flooded coastal cities, aberrant weather patterns, a Katrina catastrophe or worse every other week, and wars and rumors of wars based on the prospect of diminishing resources, including “peak oil,” all of it designed to prepare us for a dystopian future of slave labor down on the transnational corporate plantation.

Kosovo Guerrilla Veterans Warn Of New War

Reuters
Sunday July 8, 2007

Veterans of Kosovo's 1998-99 guerrilla war said on Sunday they were prepared to take up arms again if deadlock between the West and Russia continued to block the province's independence from Serbia.

Veterans of the ethnic Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) warned the international bodies running the territory, primarily the United Nations, not to block the process.

Kosovo Albanian leaders "should not accept any delay to a status decision, nor new talks, which would bring only new hostility," the veterans said in a statement published in several Kosovo newspapers. They called on parliament to declare independence.

If the demands are not met, "we the veterans of the KLA war will be forced to act as KLA soldiers to fulfill the oath of our national heroes," the statement said.

The KLA veterans' association represents rank-and-file fighters after many senior commanders entered politics and eventually Kosovo's government after the war. It is unclear how much support the KLA veterans enjoy.

The statement was the most direct warning from the KLA veterans since Serbia ally Russia slammed the brakes on a Western-backed drive at the United Nations to grant Kosovo's secession from Serbia after 8 years under U.N. administration.

Kosovo's 2 million Albanians, 90 percent of the population, are growing increasingly impatient for independence, having seen the West delay the decision twice last year to limit the expected fallout in Serbia.

The KLA waged a guerrilla war against Serb forces in 1998-99. Serbia's brutal response, expelling hundreds of thousands of Albanian civilians, drew NATO into an 11-week bombing campaign to drive out Serb forces.

Independent estimates put the civilian death toll at between 7,500 and 10,000, mostly Albanians. The territory is now patrolled by 16,000 NATO peacekeepers.

Russia has threatened to veto a Western-backed U.N. Security Council resolution effectively offering statehood.

The West is now considering more talks between Serbs and Albanians, after 13 months of dialogue that ended in stalemate in March.

But Kosovo's leaders are coming under increasing public pressure to declare independence unilaterally, a step diplomats say would split the 27-member EU and possibly trigger a breakaway bid by Serb-dominated northern Kosovo.

EU treaty: the great double deception

Christopher Booker
London Telegraph
Sunday July 8, 2007

Many people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at Gordon Brown's statement to MPs last Tuesday when, in announcing his new "constitutional settlement", he promised to give "more power to Parliament and the British people" on the one hand while, on the other, ruling out a referendum on the new EU treaty - which would take away a lot more power from Parliament and the British people.

The layers of spin and deceit that surround this wretched EU treaty are so convoluted that it takes some working out to disentangle the contradictions, U-turns and straight lies it has come to involve.

The fundamental problem is that the EU's leaders are determined to foist on the peoples of Europe the final components of a supranational government, as agreed in their constitution, without giving the peoples of Europe any say in the matter.

Ever since the constitution was rejected by the people of France and Holland, they have been trying to find a way of smuggling it back in, by pretending it was something else.

What they cleverly came up with last month was a document which looked very different and much shorter. But this was only because the original version, scrapping all the earlier treaties, reincorporated them in the new constitution.

The new document simply leaves the old treaties on the table, but adds as amendments to them all the new bits included in the constitution, such as giving the EU a full-time president and granting it a mass of other new powers.

Apart from a few cosmetic changes, such as changing "Foreign Minister" to "High Representative", and leaving out the flag and the anthem (which the EU has had since 1986 anyway), the net result is precisely what the French and the Dutch rejected in 2005.

Many Continental politicians have been quite happy to admit this. As Luxemburg's prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker put it, the new treaty contains "99 per cent" of what was in the old "Constitution for Europe".

But their hope is that, because the list of amendments making up the new document look so impenetrable, they can be slipped through without the people noticing.

This Continental trickery, however, looks quite mild compared with the sleight of hand being practised by Gordon Brown. Because he was elected on the Labour manifesto of 2005, which promised a referendum on the constitution, he dare not, like his Continental colleagues, admit that it is the same thing.

He must pretend it is something totally different. And here he has immediately become ensnared in all sorts of difficulties, because this is so blatantly not true.

One of Mr Brown's excuses for not having a referendum was that the new treaty doesn't give away as many powers as Maastricht, on which there was no referendum, But up then pops his new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to blurt out that it in fact gives away much more power than Maastricht.

Mr Brown's other excuse was that Britain has held onto all its "red lines", such as being given an opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

But up jumps the EU's former justice commissioner, Antonio Vittorini, and a gaggle of lawyers to point out that this is nonsense. A cross-reference in the treaty shows that Britain is just as much subject to the charter as anyone else.

The title of the EU's Foreign Minister may have been changed, on Tony Blair's insistence, to High Representative, but he is still being given new powers to decide EU (i e our) foreign policy which Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, described as "simply unacceptable".

As the think-tank Open Europe and others have pointed out, it is truly astonishing that Mr Brown should begin his premiership, while promising to be "open" with the British people, with a deceit so shameless as to make his predecessor look like an honest man.

It is made even more remarkable by the fact Mr Brown should do this in the very week when he was busy wrapping himself in the Union Jack and ordering that our national flag should be flown on every government building.

The British people should not just be rubbing their eyes in disbelief at Mr Brown's behaviour: they should be shouting with anger.

Judges OK warrantless monitoring of Web use

Christopher Booker
SF Chronicle
Sunday July 8, 2007

Federal agents do not need a search warrant to monitor a suspect's computer use and determine the e-mail addresses and Web pages the suspect is contacting, a federal appeals court ruled Friday.

In a drug case from San Diego County, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco likened computer surveillance to the "pen register" devices that officers use to pinpoint the phone numbers a suspect dials, without listening to the phone calls themselves.

The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the use of pen registers in 1979, saying callers have no right to conceal from the government the numbers they communicate electronically to the phone companies that carry their calls.

Federal law requires court approval for a pen register. But because it is not considered a search, authorities do not need a search warrant, which would require them to show that the surveillance is likely to produce evidence of a crime.

They also do not need a wiretap order, which would require them to show that less intrusive methods of surveillance have failed or would be futile.

In Friday's ruling, the court said computer users should know that they lose privacy protections with e-mail and Web site addresses when they are communicated to the company whose equipment carries the messages.

Likewise, the court said, although the government learns what computer sites someone visited, "it does not find out the contents of the messages or the particular pages on the Web sites the person viewed."

The search is no more intrusive than officers' examination of a list of phone numbers or the outside of a mailed package, neither of which requires a warrant, Judge Raymond Fisher said in the 3-0 ruling.

Defense lawyer Michael Crowley disagreed. His client, Dennis Alba, was sentenced to 30 years in prison after being convicted of operating a laboratory in Escondido that manufactured the drug ecstasy.

Some of the evidence against Alba came from agents' tracking of his computer use. The court upheld his conviction and sentence.

Expert evidence in Alba's case showed that the Web addresses obtained by federal agents included page numbers that allowed the agents to determine what someone read online, Crowley said.

The ruling "further erodes our privacy," the attorney said. "The great political marketplace of ideas is the Internet, and the government has unbridled access to it."