Terrorism

CAMP DAVID -- British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is regarded as a somber figure in his home country, in contrast to his predecessor, the energetic Tony Blair. But after spending four hours alone with the new British leader during dinner Sunday and a long breakfast yesterday, President Bush declared that conventional wisdom about Brown is distorted, and he said the relationship between the U.S. and Great Britain was as strong as ever, despite a change in leadership. "He's not the dour Scotsman that you describe him, or the awkward Scotsman.

WASHINGTON -- Six human rights groups released yesterday a list of 39 people they believe have been secretly imprisoned by the United States and whose whereabouts are unknown, calling on the Bush administration to abandon such detentions. The list, compiled from news media reports, interviews and government documents, includes terrorism suspects and those thought to have ties to militant groups. In some suspects' cases, officials acknowledge that they were at one time in U.S. custody. In others, the rights groups say, there is other evidence, sometimes sketchy, that they had at least once been in American hands.

London -- Three men were arrested yesterday in connection with the July 2005 explosions on the London transit system that marked suicide terrorism's deadly debut in Western Europe. British police did not say what role the men are believed to have played in the bombings, which killed 52 people. Officials described the arrests as part of a "painstaking investigation" aimed at learning the true scope of the attacks. A series of searches was being carried out in east London and in the northern English city of Leeds.

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Afghan President Hamid Karzai and President Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan signaled an improvement in relations between their two countries after an unusually cordial meeting here yesterday and called for greater cooperation in fighting terrorism. Karzai was on a two-day visit to the Pakistani capital, where he would also meet with the opposition politician Benazir Bhutto, a statement from the Afghan president's office said. Bhutto is contesting parliamentary elections scheduled for January.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush, members of Congress and virtually all counterterrorism experts have acknowledged that defeating terrorists cannot be accomplished solely by dropping bombs on them. Ultimately, they say, ending terrorism will come only by addressing its underlying causes. "Our long-term strategy to keep the peace is to help change the conditions that give rise to extremism and terror by spreading the universal principle of human liberty," Bush said in March 2005. But a close look at the United States' counterterrorism priorities shows a strategy going in the opposite direction.

WASHINGTON -- Abu Nidal, one of the world's most infamous terrorists, moved to Baghdad late last year and obtained the protection of Iraq's president, Saddam Hussein, according to intelligence reports received by U.S. and Middle Eastern government officials. The reports have raised questions about whether Iraq is pushing to establish a terrorism network, American and Middle Eastern officials say.Abu Nidal, a brutal survivor of the Middle East's terrorist wars dating to the 1970s, had been living in Cairo, Egypt, for more than a year, according to Middle Eastern government officials who say they have information from inside his organization.

O'Malley will be the nation's most exciting new young mayor since Schmoke.Let's blame air crashes on terrorism, because that only happens to someone else. If the trouble is in the plane, more passengers are at risk.South Mountain will be preserved as a Civil War battlefield and scary witch place.China's Communist bosses cannot beat Falun Gong, so they might just as well join it.

Fearing terrorism and civil unrest, some people plan to avoid the crowds on New Year's Eve, hunker down with their remote controls and watch the final minutes of 1999 dribble away on television.Yesterday, Seattle officials canceled a New Year's Eve bash at the Space Needle, a few days after an Algerian man was charged with smuggling explosives across the Canadian border. The State Department has warned of terrorist attacks abroad, and the FBI cautioned people to be on the lookout for mail bombs from Germany.

WASHINGTON -- President Clinton, concluding a series of meetings with Israel's new prime minister, said yesterday that he would personally press Syria's president, Hafez el Assad to push negotiations forward.U.S. officials said they were encouraged by reports that Syria has halted its support for Damascus-based groups that use violence to undercut the Middle East peace process.If the reports are true, they said, the shift could help Syria get taken off the list of nations that sponsor terrorism and lead to a better relationship with the United States.

JERUSALEM -- Israel's Supreme Court has banned the use of sleep deprivation, violent shaking and other "physical pressure" in interrogations, a historic ruling that outlaws the decades-long treatment of Palestinian suspects by the security police in their fight against terrorism.While acknowledging Israel's "unceasing struggle for both its very existence and security," the nine-judge panel ruled yesterday that state investigators cannot use any means available to interrogate a suspected terrorist -- even if the suspect knows where a bomb is.Interrogation methods must be reasonable, if not always painless, the court said.

Writer-director Atom Egoyan's "Adoration" plays like a post-9/11 talk show done as modernist cinema. All it does is relentlessly pose questions about terrorism, prejudice, family dynamics, the subjectivity of experience, the objectivity of facts, and the speed and shallowness of communication on the Internet. The movie's fractured structure and contrived subplots obscure a potentially affecting story and do nothing to advance the debate on any of its incendiary issues. Egoyan hooks the audience with a fiction within a fiction.

Opponents of a liquefied natural gas terminal in eastern Baltimore County stepped up their attacks Tuesday, hosting an appearance by a former CIA officer who said the $400 million project lacks critical safeguards and raises the specter of terrorism and piracy. "The more I looked into this project, the more I thought the company building it does not care about the safety implications," said Charles S. Faddis, who retired a year ago as chief of the Central Intelligence Agency's anti-terrorism unit and is a security consultant, based in Davidsonville, and a writer who has published two books on security issues.

WASHINGTON -U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies have not fully responded to requests about data shared from a Maryland State Police spying operation into anti-death penalty and anti-war activists, Sen. Benjamin L. Cardin said Tuesday. Cardin said he remains committed to seeking more information amid concerns that the Maryland data were "potentially made available" to U.S. agencies. He added that the Senate may hold a hearing on the matter this year. The Maryland Democrat made the remarks in a brief interview after the first session of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism and homeland security, which he chairs.

Arab intransigence is the real obstacle The Baltimore Sun's editorial "Listening post" (Jan. 28) claims that "the underlying issues of the conflict - terrorism, settlements, Jerusalem's future - remain obstacles to a negotiated resolution and two secure states coexisting in peace." At Camp David in 2000 and at Taba in 2001, Palestinian leadership rejected Israeli-U.S. offers of a West Bank and Gaza Strip state, with eastern Jerusalem as its capital, in exchange for peace. Instead of negotiating these offers, they pursued the terror war known as the second intifada.

WASHINGTON - The CIA's secret prisons are being closed. Harsh interrogation techniques are off-limits. And Guantanamo Bay will eventually go back to being just a naval base on the southeastern corner of Cuba. But even while dismantling these discredited programs, President Barack Obama left an equally controversial counterterrorism tool intact. Under executive orders issued by Obama on Jan. 22, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as "renditions," or the secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States.

WASHINGTON - President-elect Barack Obama will likely confront a biological or nuclear attack at home or abroad if the United States and its allies do not act decisively to prevent it, according to a report released this week by a panel created by Congress. The report found that the United States had taken important steps to counteract nuclear proliferation and, to a lesser extent, biological terrorism, but had "not kept pace with growing risks." The nine-member, bipartisan commission presented its conclusions yesterday to Vice President-elect Joe Biden and Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, Obama's nominee for secretary of Homeland Security.

MUMBAI, India - Facing mounting public anger over the response of his government and security forces to last week's assault on Mumbai, India's prime minister vowed yesterday to beef up anti-terror measures, and a top police official more pointedly fixed blame on a Pakistani group for the violence that left nearly 200 dead. But analysts and citizens alike questioned whether the government's promise of reform would lead to serious changes in an anti-terrorism effort whose systemic problems were laid bare by the assault.

Politics of late give us not the flavor of the month or the week but of the moment. The American people have recently been force-fed a steady diet of "financial crisis," and whether they admit it or not, it's a flavor that has been quite beneficial to Sen. Barack Obama's campaign. But flavors of the month, week or moment can be fleeting distractions from issues or threats that should permanently hold our attention. One such threat that has merited little or no notice from the media of late is terrorism.

Standing in front of more than 200,000 people in Berlin last week, Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate for president, said, "Now is the time to join together, through constant cooperation, strong institutions, shared sacrifice and a global commitment to progress, to meet the challenges of the 21st century." The challenge of addressing global terrorism was at the top of his list. How will that challenge be met? Is there a plan? When it comes to building and sustaining a global commitment to combating terrorism, the prescription must include filling a gaping hole by establishing an international anti-terrorism body that would provide a forum for the U.S. to engage, in a sustained manner, with its traditional and nontraditional allies on a wide range of issues related to tackling terrorism worldwide.

MIAMI - Senior U.S. military officers will be scrambled from around the world this weekend for jury duty at Guantanamo Bay in the Pentagon's first war crimes trial since World War II. In a victory for the Bush administration in its protracted quest to prosecute terror suspects held at Guantanamo, a federal judge in Washington rejected defense attorneys' appeals yesterday to halt the trial of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen,...