President Assad of Syria says his country?s intelligence operatives, who are notorious for using torture to get information, are secretly cooperating with American agents in the fight against al-Qaeda. He?s miffed because Syria, which has been our enemy for many years now, is not getting any credit for their efforts. He?s threatening to disclose details of the joint Syrian-U.S. program if we don?t acknowledge it and says that Syria tipped us off three months ago to a al-Qaeda plan that would have killed ?many American soldiers.?
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Science and military experts disagree somewhat on the potential devastation that would be caused by the explosion of a dirty bomb, like the kind the accused al-Qaeda terrorist Abdullah al Mujahir was allegedly planning to build.

They all agree that a dirty bomb is not the same as a conventional nuclear weapon, which produces intense heat and radiation from splitting atoms and kills huge number of people instantly. A dirty bomb has radioactive material inside or around conventional explosives, which are then detonated to spread the radioactivity. This kind of radiation doesn?t immediately kill, according to Naval War College professor William Martel, “But it’d create huge amounts of terror, havoc, and panic.”
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Murry Weiss writes in the New York Post that cops in New York had to free a suspicious gang of illegal Middle Eastern immigrants because the INS “didn’t want to be bothered” on Memorial Day weekend. The police couldn?t figure out if they were the hard-working immigrants they claimed to be or a terrorist cell, so they had to let them go. They all admitted they were in the U.S. illegally and some of them had phony IDs. They could have been held if agents from the Immigration and Naturalization Service had shown up.

“What’s the point of stopping vans and risking your life when the one agency with power blows you off?” says one of the cops. “And this is after September 11.”
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In Maitland, Florida, residents of an apartment building found a terrorism warning posted on their doors. Tenants in Renton, Washington received a warning letter from their landlord. This is the result of a recent FBI warning, which was sent to the agency’s field offices, that al-Qaeda has threatened to rent apartments with the intention of turning them into bombs and blowing them up. The warning has been handled differently by various landlords in different states.

The FBI warning says the threat is unconfirmed and does not specify any target. A U.S. government official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the information came from interviews with prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
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