"But intelligence officials have been most alarmed by reports from Iran that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is trying to persuade al-Qa'eda to promote a pro-Iranian activist to a senior position within its leadership.
The Iranians want Saif al-Adel, a 46-year-old former colonel in Egypt's special forces, to be the organisation's number three.
Al-Adel was formerly bin Laden's head of security, and was named on the FBI's 22 most wanted list after September 11 for his alleged involvement in terror attacks against US targets in Somalia and Africa in the 1990s. He has been living in a Revolutionary Guard guest house in Teheran since fleeing from Afghanistan in late 2001.
Alarm over al-Qa'eda deepened yesterday with a Foreign Office warning that the group was determined to acquire the technology to carry out a nuclear attack on the West.
A senior Foreign Office official said that the terrorists were trawling the world for the materials and know-how to mount an attack using nuclear, chemical or biological weapons.
The official said: "We know that the aspiration is there, we know attempts to gather materials are there, we know that attempts to gather technologies are there."
This morning in Bangladesh will begin the trial of Salah Uddin Shoaib Choudhury, a journalist facing what he himself believes to be the near certainty of a death sentence for sedition. His chief crime, notwithstanding the technical charges for which he is ostensibly on trial, is sympathy for Israel. He has been accused at various times of being too pro-Jew and pro-Christian, of being an Israeli spy, and of being an agent of the Mossad. This because, unusually in a majority-Muslim country with a pronounced Islamist streak, Mr. Choudhury opted out of the ambient radicalism.
"On November 7, 2006 Iran, the sponsor of the terrorist organization Hezbollah and its recent war against Israel, said the following in a public session at UN New York Headquarters: "The Israeli government is behaving like a savage animal." He added that Israel had no right to exist: "the history of Israel has always been suffering from a lack of legitimacy." No one in the room stopped him; the UN rules of order saw nothing wrong with this kind of language - regardless of the equality of member states, the UN Charter, or the ashes of Holocaust victims upon which it stands.
The Iranian verbiage is not random. On November 8, 2006 Hamas spokesperson Ghazi Hamad, said: "Israel should be wiped from the face of the Earth. It is an animal state that recognises no human worth. It is a cancer that should be eradicated."
Analogizing Jews to vermin was a hallmark of Nazi Germany. Today it marks the halls of the UN."
The track record leaves a lot to be desired in terms of resources, investigations, timeliness, convictions and sentencing. Other than that things are running smoothly.
lumber dispute? As for the American election, corruption was a significant issue- same as in Canada when the Liberals were running things? Before they jump for joy, did the Liberals pass the Accountability Act yet or do they think corruption is a good thing in politics?
