Research facility site of FBI probe into suspected Chinese espionage

A dozen keys to top-secret rooms inside a U.S. nuclear-weapons research facility have gone missing, prompting national security concerns.

The Department of Energy's inspector general raised the red flag Tuesday in a critical report obtained by Agence France-Presse.

On May 5, officials at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California reported one set of master keys missing. The discovery was actually made on April 17. The DOE report ups the ante to 12 keys.

"The loss of the master keys and the Tesa card, and the delay in reporting these losses, raised the possibility of security vulnerabilities at the laboratory," Inspector General Gregory Friedman warned in the report.

The nature of the work done at the national lab, which is managed by the University of California, is so sensitive that only a handful of personnel possess master keys.

Tesa cards are plastic cards with a magnetic strip that function as keys.

Through his investigation, Friedman found security officers had known about the loss of keys but failed to report it, in violation of rules that require such losses to be reported within 24 hours.

"We concluded that Livermore did not have adequate internal controls to ensure that security incidents involving missing master keys and Tesa cards were reported within required timeframes," Friedman wrote in the report, according to Agence France-Presse.

[. . . .]

Livermore was the site of an FBI espionage investigation, with agents suspecting former weapons scientist Gwo-Bao Min of having spied for China.

While at Livermore's D-Division, which studies the military uses of nuclear weapons, Min had access to secrets about the W-70, or neutron bomb, which U.S. intelligence believes were leaked to China. According to the 1999 Cox Report, "this suspect may have provided the PRC (People's Republic of China) additional classified information about other U.S. weapons that could have significantly accelerated the PRC's nuclear-weapons program."

Min was forced to resign in 1981 under suspicion of passing bomb secrets to Beijing, though no criminal charges were filed.

WorldNetDaily exclusively reported Min was later spotted in December 1990 by an FBI counterintelligence agent in China near the North Korean border, raising suspicions that U.S. nuclear secrets may have also found their way to the "axis of evil" state the Bush administration seeks to thwart.

University student assaulted 13-year-old

A 21-year-old Toronto man who admitted he sexually assaulted a 13-year-old girl he met on the Internet was spared a criminal record yesterday. Justice William Babe gave Payam Daneshvar a conditional discharge -- meaning he'll have no criminal conviction -- but ordered him to perform 75 hours of community service and serve 18 months of probation after he pleaded guilty to sexual interference.

[. . . .]

Last September, Daneshvar chatted online with the victim as she accessed a chat room called "teenchat.com" on a private school computer, Crown attorney Mary-Anne Mackett said in reading an agreed statement of facts.

He learned she was 13 years old and asked her if she'd like to fellate him and if she'd consider dating him, even though he's 19, Mackett said.

Daneshvar obtained her cellphone number, which he phoned to continue their explicit chat.

The next day he unexpectedly showed up at her school, met her and her friend. Once he was alone with her, he pushed her into a washroom and fondled her. She reported it two weeks later.

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Homeland Security Department is warning law-enforcement officers al-Qaida may be plotting to fly cargo planes from another country into such crucial targets in the United States as nuclear plants, bridges or dams, an agency official said Friday night.

Separately, the U.S. Embassy in Saudi Arabia said it would close its diplomatic missions in that country Saturday for an undetermined period because of credible information terrorists are about to carry out attacks.

The United States also warned that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan may attempt to kidnap American journalists working in that country.

[. . . .]

A Homeland Security official said the information about the cargo planes, first reported Friday by NBC News, came from a single source overseas.

"It has not yet been corroborated," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "We're in the process of trying to corroborate this information."

"We also remain concerned about threats to the aviation industry and the use of cargo planes to carry out attacks on critical infrastructure," the official said.

Both the Homeland Security Department and the FBI were posting an advisory Friday night alerting state and local authorities to the threat, Roehrkasse said. The advisory also was being directed to officials responsible for security at such infrastructure facilities as nuclear plants, bridges and dams, he said.

The information about possible attacks in the Middle East came from a separate source than the information about possible attacks using cargo aircraft, the official said.

[. . . .]

Critics have said the Transportation Security Administration, the agency responsible for aviation security, hadn't done enough to make cargo planes safe. Those criticisms intensified when a New York shipping clerk packed himself in a crate and flew undetected to his parents' home in Dallas.

[. . . .]

Only a small percentage of cargo is checked before being shipped in cargo or passenger planes. Neither air marshals nor armed pilots are aboard cargo planes, and areas where cargo is handled at airports are not as secure as passenger terminals.

3-2 ruling based on traditional definition of extramarital activity
Married women are free to have extramarital sexual relations with other women, says the New Hampshire Supreme Court, without being at fault for the break-up of their marriage.

In a 3-2 ruling handed down today, the jurists decided the definition of adultery doesn't include homosexual sex, but requires heterosexual intercourse to have taken place.

The decision comes in a contentious divorce case.

David Blanchflower, of Hanover, N.H., originally filed for divorce from his wife, Sian, on grounds of irreconcilable differences. He then amended his petition, asserting his wife's "continuing adulterous affair" with Robin Mayer, a woman from Brownsville, Vt., caused the irreparable breakdown of their marriage.

An "at fault" finding benefits the husband in the division of the couple's property.
The two women attempted to block his efforts, contending a homosexual relationship between two people, one of whom is married, does not constitute adultery according to state divorce law.

The trial court disagreed with the women's argument and ruled in favor of the husband, prompting Mayor to pursue the issue with the state's high court.

In rendering their decision, the justices found the outdated law didn't define adultery. In the absence of necessary definitions, they explained in their opinion, they must "ascribe to them their plain and ordinary meanings."

In other words, they looked the word up in Webster's Third New International Dictionary and found the word defined as involving intercourse between members of opposite genders.

The justices further relied on case law from the period during which the 1842 divorce statute was drafted and concluded the definition of adultery as it was applied in State v. Wallace in 1838 and State v. Taylor in 1878 was "intercourse from which a spurious issue may arise." They deduced that because a "spurious issue" can only arise from intercourse between a man and a woman, "criminal adultery could only be committed with a person of the opposite gender."

MONTREAL (CP) - Bombardier Inc. has no intention of moving its aircraft assembly lines out of Canada, a company spokeswoman said Friday.

"Bombardier is not going anywhere," Dominique Dionne said. Dionne said chief executive Paul Tellier was quoted out of context when he suggested in an interview the company could decide to move its aircraft production out of Canada if its export subsidies are slashed. Bloomberg News quoted Tellier as saying: "If that kind of support is not possible in this country, we"ll draw some conclusions, like where we're going to make planes."

Dionne said Tellier was just giving "a generic example of why we need a public policy debate" on public support for aerospace exports.

People must think I am a nut case but after watching our justice system for many years I have this to say about it.

It Stinks!

With the backdrop a spate of violence that has rocked the city during the past week, police Chief Julian Fantino is calling for an inquiry to examine the effectiveness of the justice system.

"It's a very, very serious situation," Fantino said during a news conference at police headquarters yesterday, citing the past week's five killings, including three shootings, a strangulation and a stabbing Wednesday night that resulted in the city's 52nd homicide victim this year.

These "Shining Knights" of the Canadian justice system are the stupidest bunch of people I have ever seen. They are eclipsed only by the supreme jerk that brought this all on us -- Pierre Elliot Trudeau!

He bequeathed a windfall of magnificent proportions to all lawyers in this country and YOU -- the Canadian taxpayer -- are paying the bill every working day of your lives!

Now we find that they have ruled -- in their infinite wisdom -- that THEY know all and our ELECTED representatives know NOTHING.

Well folks, I'm here to tell you now that I know a lot about this pitiful legal system that we enjoy in this country and it "ain't pretty"!

I have never witnessed such an "abrogation of duty" as that that Canada now enjoys!

Fantino is exactly right and there is a way to solve this problem.

Vote conservative in the next election no matter what and keep this LIBERAL "social engineering club" at bay for at least the next hundred and fifty years.

Canadian courts are pondering whether governments should override private contracts when people, or their marriages, die. We urge them to tread lightly on wills, but more heavily on prenuptials.

In one case, which may be appealed, a judge upheld a woman's will depriving some nieces and nephews of any inheritance because they didn't attend her funeral. In another, the Supreme Court of Canada will hear an appeal of a ruling that a prenuptial agreement can't overrule B.C. provincial matrimonial law. The specifics we leave to the courts. But the principles are of concern to all citizens.

No private contract is valid if it offends against public policy. . . .

Even contracts that don't offend the law could be invalid if they violate normal expectations. A will that secretly leaves a pittance from a large fortune to a spouse of 50 years for buttering the wrong side of the toast would likely not withstand court scrutiny. But while legal arrangements that were clearly entered into by persons of unsound mind are not valid, eccentricity is not insanity. . . .

Marriage is somewhat different. If it were just another agreement between consenting adults, it could be left to ordinary contract law. But family formation is so fundamental that the state has a legitimate interest in ensuring that it is done reasonably fairly. That interest continues even when a marriage breaks down.

A one-size-fits-all divorce formula isn't the answer, but there must be legal boundaries on how destitute a divorce can leave one party, . . .

What a relief to know the $5.3 million in taxpayers' money used to upgrade a tiny, little-used rural airport in Charlevoix was in no way a favour to the family of Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's son-in-law. True, the amount was vastly more than was spent on remote airports in other provinces. True, the Desmarais clan, hugely wealthy and influential, has a $40-million estate nearby. But tourism is important to the region, federal officials assert, and so there's nothing improper about the spending.

. . . . here's our proposal, offered in a spirit of helpfulness:

Why doesn't Ottawa pass a law requiring the Desmarais clan to open their estate, a couple days a week and for one full month in the summer, for tourists to visit? Something similar works fairly well for stately homes in England.

Who knows? Perhaps the Desmarais family would take such a step voluntarily. Doing that, as a gesture of noblesse oblige, would instantly erase the slightest public suspicion, utterly erroneous but lingering, nonetheless, this airport project was the most revolting kind of special treatment. We look forward to hearing from them.

There is a "high threat" of terrorist attacks against British citizens in Bahrain, the Foreign Office has said.

Britons in the Middle Eastern state should review their security arrangements and "remain vigilant, particularly in public places", the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said.

The British embassy in Bahrain added that it was particularly concerned about the threat of terrorist attacks on places where westerners might gather.

Riyadh, Saudi Arabia — The United States will close its missions in Saudi Arabia on Saturday for an undetermined period because of "credible" information that terrorists are about to carry out attacks, the U.S. Embassy said Friday.

The Canadian embassy will remain open, however, a Foreign Affairs spokeswoman said.

The United States also warned that Taliban insurgents in Afghanistan may attempt to kidnap American journalists working in that country.

The U.S. Embassy in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, said Americans in the kingdom should be "vigilant when in any area that is perceived to be American or Western."

The embassy said in a warden message on its website that the missions in Riyadh, Jiddah and Dhahran would close to assess their "security posture."

They will then advise the American community when the review is completed and when the missions plan to resume normal operations.

The embassy said it had received "credible information that terrorists in Saudi Arabia have moved from the planning to operational phase of planned attacks in the kingdom."

[. . . .]

She said her department would continue to evaluate the security situation in the kingdom. Canadians have been advised against travelling to Saudi Arabia and those who remain are urged to exercise extreme caution and keep in touch with the embassy or its wardens.

On Monday, Saudi police uncovered a cell believed linked to al-Qaida network in the holy city of Mecca. Police believe the cell had planned to carry out attacks during Ramadan.

On the second anniversary of the darkest day in recent American history, U.S. relations with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia remain clouded by an undeniable reality: the conspiracy to attack the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as well as other probable targets, was a product of Saudi society.

There can simply be no doubt about these facts:

- Al-Qaida is a product of, an embodiment of, indeed the quintessential expression of Wahhabism, the state ideology of the Saudi kingdom.
- All nineteen of the participants in the 9/11 atrocities were Wahhabis, of which 15 were Saudi subjects.
- Osama bin Laden is an exemplary representative of Wahhabism and of Saudi society, who, with other rich Saudis, financed al-Qaida and its associated groupings.
- Saudi/Wahhabi official institutions including the Muslim World League (MWL), the World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), and the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) have been complicit in the financing, recruitment, and operational aspects of al-Qaida terrorism.
- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia refuses to accept responsibility for its subjects' involvement in terrorism.
- The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has failed to participate as a trustworthy partner with the U.S. in the antiterror coalition.

In other words, put bluntly, two years after 9/11, nothing has changed.

This is an appalling matter to contend with, for American citizens. A long tradition of apology for and accommodation with the bloody, repressive Saudi regime, by the American political and business elite, has left a hole in the history of the American nation.

This gap is unacceptable. The U.S.-Saudi relationship represents an inveiglement with corruption, repression, and terror as bad as or worse than that between our country and any left- or right-wing dictatorship in the past. Can we really imagine that if 15 out of 19 of the 9/11 murderers had been Cuban agents, even the Hollywood left that adulates Castro would call for a hands-off approach to the Havana regime? And if 15 out of the 19 had been representatives of one of the right-wing dictators of the past, like Pinochet, we can only imagine liberals calling for the most extreme sanctions against the regime with which it originated. But in the Saudi case, an uneasy silence prevails in the executive branch of government, and even in influential media.

[. . . .]

Since September 11th, a number of additional incidents have occurred, which illuminate the pernicious nature of the Saudi-Wahhabi order.

. . . .And although the Saudis tell us they will curtail extremist preaching by Wahhabi clerics, who are paid officials of the state, every Friday sermon in the kingdom features incitement to terror by hundreds of imams. Few clerics have been removed from their posts, and those who have been are mainly old men who failed to justify their paychecks by regular attendance at work.

[. . . .]

Back here at home, we heard that Princess Haifa bint Faisal, wife of the Saudi ambassador Prince Bandar bin Sultan, donated money that somehow wound up in the pockets of two leading participants in the 9/11 plot, thanks somehow to the activities of Omar al-Bayoumi, who appears to have been a Saudi government agent. Then the congressional report on intelligence failures leading to 9/11 appeared, and although it included transactions between al-Bayoumi and the terrorists, Princess Haifa was shielded from further scrutiny.

In my view, September 11th was not about us. It was about them. It was not about American power, hegemony, oil interests, Christianity, or relations with Israel. It was about the inevitable pressure from millions of Saudi subjects who possess satellite dishes and computers, who have been educated in modern technology and have seen the world, and who desire to live in a normal society that, while Islamic in traditions and essence, would more resemble Malaysia.

WHEN AQILA AL-HASHIMI was murdered on her way to work at the end of September, some people cheered. A modern Iraqi Shia woman who wore no headscarf, al-Hashimi was also a former mid-level diplomat for the Baathist regime and as such earned the fury of Iraqi extremists when she joined the post-Saddam transitional body, the Iraqi National Council. "Praise God, The Death of the Traitor Aqila al-Hashimi is Confirmed," screamed the website www.alerhap.com . The posting continued:

The media have confirmed the death of the criminal Aqila al-Hashimi, who accepted a cheap sellout of her country and nation to the American enemies. The rest of the traitors are in line for the same treatment, especially the head criminal, Ahmed Chalabi. It is well known that the Governing Council has no other aim than to legitimize the American and Zionist invasion of Iraq. That is why the American aggressors had their medical teams work hard to save the life of the criminal Aqila al-Hashimi.

The web, of course, is full of nasty sites and inflammatory postings. Such things are bound to crop up in a widely accessible medium that is uncensored. What makes alerhap--an al-Qaeda website--interesting is that it offers an example of hate-mongering tolerated in a virtual environment that is actively censored: that of Saudi Arabia.

Sure enough, the same Riyadh regime that continually promises to curb incitement by its state-supported Wahhabi clerics and media
--the same regime that successfully blocks websites airing enlightened attitudes toward women, Islam, pluralism, freedom, and democracy--leaves unimpeded inflammatory websites that recruit for violent jihad.

One Saudi writer who has complained about the government's policy on websites is Nahed Bashath. Her essay "Banning Sites or Banning Minds" was allowed to appear in the major daily al-Riyadh on August 17, in keeping with the regime's present unpredictable pattern of feints toward openness and promises of reform. Bashath reported that the authorities had just blocked access to a website on violence against women run by the Arab Regional Resource Center at www.amanjordan.org

Not only that, but Bashath cited a study carried out by Jonathan Zittrain and Benjamin Edelman, both at Harvard Law School, which funded the project, in cooperation with the Saudi government's Internet Services Unit. Titled "Documentation of Internet Filtering in Saudi Arabia," the survey found that the Saudis were blocking such sources of subversion as websites run by the Anne Frank House and Amnesty International, as well as sites relating to Shia Islam, Christianity, the Baha'i faith, and tolerance and interfaith dialogue generally. The Harvard study is available online, at least to Westerners, at Harvard law

Its executive summary is worth quoting at length:

Abstract: The authors connected to the Internet through proxy servers in Saudi Arabia and attempted to access approximately 60,000 Web pages as a means of empirically determining the scope and pervasiveness of Internet filtering there. Saudi-installed filtering systems prevented access to certain requested Web pages; the authors tracked 2,038 blocked pages. Such pages contained information about religion, health, education, reference, humor, and entertainment. The authors conclude (1) that the Saudi government maintains an active interest in filtering non-sexually explicit Web content for users within the Kingdom; (2) that substantial amounts of non-sexually explicit Web content is in fact effectively inaccessible to most Saudi Arabians; and (3) that much of this content consists of sites that are popular elsewhere in the world.

The Saudis' explanation for blocking sites is predictable: "preserv[ing] our Islamic values, filtering Internet content to prevent materials that contradict our beliefs or may influence our culture." According to the Harvard researchers, the Saudis further explained that they block sites "related to drugs, bombs, alcohol, gambling, and pages insulting the Islamic religion or the Saudi laws and regulations."

Is “Islam,” at least the version practiced in the West, compatible with Western values, democracy, traditions and history? This issue is largely avoided in the United States, under the rug of “diversity” and “multiculturalism”? If not, are “Islam” and its never-challenged “representatives” to be seen as a danger? What is to happen when freedom of expression and religion conflict with democratic rule, separation of religion and state, and with the more important but less legally defined concept of national identity? Do nations and their voters have a right to a distinct cultural identity and history of their own, or are they forced to give up that identity for the sake of “diversity, “ multiculturalism” and “anti-racism”? Americans, or at least American business and cultural elites, in a strange alliance, are still sleep walking around these issues? However, Europeans - especially the French, Germans and British; that is to say, the largest powers - cannot do so anymore, as a number of cases in France and Germany are proving.

[The article goes on to detail several cases in Germany and France. Do link to this article.]

The problem is that UOIF, an offshoot of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is heavily subsidized by Gulf money), is adept at manipulating existing law and prevailing social mores to promote its own agenda - an agenda that includes Islamic schools, the first of which opened in September. Where the state refuse to accept Muslim students wearing Islamic symbols, it would strengthen UOIF’s call for more private Islamic schools - soon to become the equivalents of Pakistani madrassas and Indonesian pesantren: recruitment centers for radicals in the country of the Enlightenment. It is indicative that UOIF’s very name, “of France” rather than “French,” suggests “exile” in the Islamic sense of the word.

While France, with some 5 million Muslims - or, more precisely persons originating in Muslim states (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, etc.), approximately half of whom do not practice Islam - is now forced to face the issue of Muslim integration. So is Germany with its 3million Muslims. But the United Kingdom (2.5 million Muslims), and other European countries seem to believe that this is a non-issue, considering it politically incorrect to even discuss the matter. Thus, a Muslim girl wearing a scarf in a British school has no problems whatsoever. For that matter, an educated Pakistani Muslim businessman who speaks no English after years of living in Britain on an uncertain immigration status, had no trouble being elected to a local city council and demanding the taxpayers pay for a translator in order for him to do his job. That explains why counter-terrorism analysts coined term “Londonistan.”

[. . . .]

From Aubervilliers to Karlsruhe to Göteborg to Granada - and perhaps soon, Detroit - the issue appears to be more or less the same. It is not nearly as confusing or “complex” as the liberals would make it. Are Western values like freedom of religion and secularism to be sacrificed as “outdated” in a “multiculturalist”? How ironic that the same people who applaud the prohibition of any church or synagogue in Saudi Arabia support a “democratic right” to build Europe’s largest mosque very close to the Vatican.

One the positive side, just as half of French “Muslims,” like Alma and Lila’s mother, are “non-practicing” (or more accurately, practicing their religion at home). Muslims in the West need not lose their faith. But perhaps the nations of the West need to restrain its immigration policies, and beyond that, to discuss the broader question of national identity and laicité.

POW shares brutal details of experience in biography

Advance press of former POW Jessica Lynch's biography includes the shocking revelation the 19-year-old Army supply clerk was raped and sodomized by her Iraqi captors.

[. . . .]

News of the assault disturbs military advocate Elaine Donnelly, who has pressed the Pentagon for such details to no avail.

[. . . .]

Donnelly, who heads the Center for Military Readiness, an independent public-policy organization that specializes in military personnel issues, and is a member of WND's Speakers Bureau, blames Lynch's tragic experience on what she calls "social engineering" policies instituted in the military over the last decade by "Pentagon feminists" seeking to advance the careers of servicewomen at the cost, she says, of military morale, efficiency and readiness.

Donnelly has called on Commander in Chief Bush to give direction to the Pentagon to roll back Clinton-era policies such as females serving in combat roles, gender quotas, co-ed basic training, the deployment of single mothers and pregnant servicewomen and "overly generous pregnancy policies that subsidize and therefore increase single parenthood."

[. . . .]

At the time of the false report, Donnelly suspected military officials were spinning the Jessica Lynch story to head off criticism for placing Lynch in a combat-support position in which she became a POW.

Donnelly argues that once Lynch was captured, she became a public figure plastered all over television sets around the world. She maintains that the issue of whether war crimes have been committed carries policy implications.

"If the Pentagon puts a happy face on the situation and describes her injuries as only being broken bones, they're not being honest with the American public and with women recruits."

[. . . .]

This is not the first time the assault of a female POW in the Iraqi theater of war was kept under wraps. Flight surgeon Rhonda Cornum was sexually assaulted after being taken prisoner in the Persian Gulf War, . . . .

[. . . .]

"While I was subjected to an unpleasant episode of sexual abuse during my captivity," she said, "it did not represent a threat to life, limb or chance of being released, and therefore occupied a much lower level of concern than it might have under other circumstances."

Cornum offers pre-deployment advice for female soldiers, recommending birth-control methods such as the IUD or implants and suggests they be commenced before deployment "to avoid problems for monogamous women whose spouses might not understand the risk issue."

Donnelly and other military advocates question the nonchalance afforded to the sexual assault of female soldiers.

"This is an opportunity to search our souls as a nation and determine whether we want this to continue," she said.