www.mirror.co.uk Feb 28 2003 By Gary Jones

A TERRIFYING security loophole was exposed by a Daily Mirror sight-seeing flight over London yesterday.

We hired a helicopter without identity or luggage checks and flew over many of the capital's landmarks - including the Houses of Parliament, Canary Wharf and the City of London.

TARGET: Parliament

Had we been terrorists, it would have been easy to overpower the pilot and send the helicopter crashing onto the House of Commons or Big Ben.

We could have hurled a bomb or unleashed a deadly poison cloud.

Buckingham Palace was within close range. And at one point, the helicopter hovered over Parliament at 1,500ft.

We passed the Commons three times, causing so much noise that guests at a special lunch attended by Lord Tebbit could hardly hear themselves speak.

Intelligence sources have warned that al-Qaeda terrorists might attempt a propaganda suicide bombing of Westminster.

Helicopter sight-seeing tours were banned briefly after the September 11 attacks in America.

In the US, tough security measures were introduced following the air hijackings - including stringent identity and bag checks for helicopter flights.

But there were no questions asked when photographer Emma Cattell and myself arrived at Biggin Hill in Kent for yesterday's trip. We didn't even give our full names.

I had phoned Biggin Hill Helicopters at about 10.30am saying I wanted to hire a helicopter for a sight-seeing tour as a birthday present for my girlfriend.

At first I was told one wasn't available because of a training lesson but I was called back shortly afterwards on a mobile phone to be told: "If you can get here by 1.15pm you'll be OK."

After parking directly outside BHH's prefabricated building, I was met by a man called Will, who said: "You must be Gary."

After a short briefing about the flight, involving how to wear seatbelts correctly and avoid the rotor blades, the four-seater helicopter landed to pick us up.

I had a black bag with strap slung over my shoulder and my colleague a large handbag containing a digital camera. At no stage were the bags checked for their contents. They were not even given a cursory glance.

The only mention made of my bag - which could easily have concealed a gun or a gas canister - was when I laid it at my feet.

I was asked by the pilot called Simon, in his late 20s, what it contained. I replied: "A camera." I was told to put the bag in the back because it could become entangled in the pedals.

No check had been made on either of our identities before we boarded the flight. Apart from the credit card details which I had given over the phone earlier, BHH had no information about us.

It was only after we had landed and were driving back to London that an address was asked for so a receipt could be given for the cost of the flight.

The helicopter emblazoned with the sign LBC - the capital's independent radio station which hires the chopper for its travel reports - flew directly towards Canary Wharf before following the path of the River Thames.

The spectacular journey passed the City of London and was supposed to end at Battersea power station.

But our trip was interrupted by a Ministry of Defence Chinook helicopter taking special services personnel to the Duke of York's barracks at Chelsea.

The distinctive dark green MoD chopper was given priority and flew beneath us a couple of kilometres away as we hovered above the Commons.

Helicopter sight-seeing trips follow a pre-determined path into the capital, twisting and turning along the Thames.

But with the Houses of Parliament directly on the river, a terrorist would not need to manoeuvre the helicopter any great distance to hit the target. Security services and anti- terrorist police have warned of the threat of attack.

Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens says: "It is not a question of if, but when."

Earlier this month troops and tanks guarded Heathrow Airport after warnings of a possible surface-to-air missile attack on aircraft. A grenade was found in the possession of a passenger who flew into Gatwick from Venezuela.

Home Secretary David Blunkett said at the time: "First this reinforces that we really do have a problem.

"People have been saying that it doesn't exist. Second, it means that our security services are on the ball. Third, it has given us leads and over the next few days we need to follow them through."

Anti-terror police have a massive ongoing offensive against alleged British supporters of Osama bin Laden.

A joint investigation between police, MI5 and MI6 continues to target bin Laden loyalists in Britain and around the world.

UK security forces are hunting scores of British Muslims trained by bin Laden and suspected of plotting attacks here. It has emerged that the names of almost 1,200 suspects are known to the intelligence services.

Some who survived the collapse of the Taliban in Afghanistan are thought to have sneaked into Britain where they have gone to ground but remain sympathetic to al-Qaeda which has made Britain its number one target in Europe.

Within weeks of the attacks in New York and Washington, three Algerians were arrested in Leicester, suspected of being involved in a plot to crash a helicopter into the US embassy building in Paris.

They were all members of an Algerian Islamic terror group, Tafkir-Wal-Hijra, and were captured after the arrest of the group's leader Djamel Begal in Dubai.

Begal, 35, had confessed to police that he ran three groups in Europe, including one in Leicester where he had lived for a short time in the 1990s.

Detectives in the Midlands have investigated the backgrounds of hundreds of Algerian asylum-seekers who have entered Britain from the strife-torn country.

Some are believed to be belong to the fanatical Armed Islamic Group (GIA) which aims to overthrow the Algerian regime and replace it with a strict Islamic state.

A source in the Birmingham Algerian community said: "Mostly they help to raise funds through credit card and passport frauds but there are others who are more actively involved in organising terrorist activities."

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, February 27, 2003 By: Patrick J. O'Donoghue

Basque ex-pat Jose Arturo Cubillas 937) says he is in danger of being spirited out of the country by Spanish secret service agents, even though he has been legally in Venezuela since the Venezuelan and Spanish governments signed an agreement as far back as 1989 to accept ETA separatist movement militants as residents .

Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar has sent secret service agents to Venezuela to monitor and harass Cubillas, who confronted one alleged agent that had been tailing him for days.

• The Ombudsman’s Office attempted to get the man’s name but he ran off.

The Spanish Embassy has refused to comment on the matter and Interpol director Israel Galindo is permanently at a meeting. The Venezuelan government’s record on defending ETA militants legally in Venezuela has been cracking after several former militants were extradited in record time.

Basque exiles in Venezuela complain that the State Political & Security (DISIP) Police is actively collaborating with the Spanish in tailing and making life difficult for Basque militants and their families. PROVEA human rights group is taking up Cubillas' case.

www.vheadline.com Posted: Thursday, February 27, 2003 By: Robert Rudnicki

The United States embassy in Caracas will not be opening today due to a security alert following the bombings of Colombian and Spanish diplomatic missions this week. An embassy statement said "the US embassy in Caracas has received a credible threat to its security and will be closed to the public on Thursday, February 27, 2003."

Exact details of the threat were not made available, but the embassy is expected to open again normally on Friday this week.

• Security measures have been stepped up at many diplomatic buildings in Caracas, as the government seeks to reassure foreign diplomats about possible safety risks.

Opposition leaders have accused government supporters of the attacks, while government members are blaming sections of the opposition looking to further damage the government's international reputation.

www.boston.com By Stephen Ixer, Associated Press, 2/27/2003

CARACAS - A march by thousands of antigovernment protesters forced the suspension yesterday of talks aimed at ending Venezuela's political turmoil, while the US Embassy beefed up security following ''credible'' threats.

Marching just days after the arrest of a leader of a crippling two-month strike, the demonstrators dared President Hugo Chavez's government to jail them, waving placards reading ''Chavez, your mask is off, dictator!'' and ''Put us all in prison!''

Talks between government and opposition delegates were scheduled to begin midafternoon yesterday, but the marchers' route passed by the negotiations venue, forcing their rescheduling until today.

Protest leader Carlos Fernandez has been ordered under house arrest to face rebellion and other charges for leading the 63-day general strike against Chavez. Police are searching for strike co-leader and labor boss Carlos Ortega.

The protesters marched past the Fedecamaras business chamber of which Fernandez is president and ended at the labor confederation headquarters where Ortega is president. There were no reports of violence.

Meanwhile, the US Embassy closed yesterday after receiving ''credible information of a threat to its security,'' a statement said. On Tuesday, two bombs ravaged Colombian and Spanish diplomatic missions, injuring four people and generating more fears.

At US request, Venezuelan officials said they sent more than a dozen federal agents, national guardsmen, and municipal police to boost security around the embassy.

This story ran on page A10 of the Boston Globe on 2/27/2003.

athena.tbwt.com By Saul  Landau ZNet Article Dated 2/26/2003

If you had taken up terrorism as your life's vocation, or even as a means to a political end, President Bush's State of the Union words would have put you into a state of terrible gloom. "We have the terrorists on the run," he boasted, "we're keeping them on the run. One by one the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice." He referred to "3000 terrorists arrested in many countries." He alluded to other terrorists killed by the forces of good.

"My God," the anti-Castro Cuban terrorist would say, "Bush seems serious about punishing terrorists or anyone even harboring a terrorist. My professional life is over. How will I make a living and God willing, overthrow Fidel Castro with force and violence? For forty years I have plotted safely with my co-conspirators in the United States," he complains, "and now Bush, whom we helped elect by intimidating the vote counters in Dade County Florida and by voting ourselves early and often rewards us by making such terrible threats against terrorists? Damn him and those crazy Al-Qaeda Arabs as well! By crashing those planes into the twin towers and Pentagon, they gave terrorism a bad name."

Not so fast, I say to myself. President Bush excoriated the terrorists who had done the 9/11 deeds. He even called them "cowards," which I couldn't quite understand. But he had a silent qualifying clause: terrorists who want to kill Castro, bomb Cuban targets, hijack Cuban planes or ships or do any other kinds of violence against Cuba still have the green light from the White House.

Indeed, he, his brother Jeb, the Florida Governor and his Attorney General John Ashcroft, have made a point of not only harboring, but actually coddling - in 1950 Joe McCarthy falsely accused the State Department of "coddling communists" terrorists. On May 20, 2002, Bush specifically invited several famous notorious? terrorists to hear his speech in Miami.

Orlando Bosch at first received an invitation to sit on the platform. Later, when one of his advisers discovered that Bosch had earned the FBI's label of the Western Hemisphere's most dangerous terrorist, the seating arrangement changed and Bosch got dis-invited off the platform and moved into the audience.

Bosch claimed credit in an interview with the Miami New Times (see Oct. 4, 2001 for further reference) for helping to blow up a Cuban commercial airliner over Barbados in October 1976. The police caught him after he fired a bazooka at a Polish ship in the Miami Harbor in 1967. This former pediatrician has cared little about children's health, but found his calling in violence and spent much of his adult life after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959 practicing that vocation.

Observers noted the Bush family attachment to violent Cubans when President George Bush I (41), with help from Otto Reich, his then Ambassador to Venezuela, overruled strong advice from the FBI and INS and admitted Orlando Bosch into the United States.

Similarly, just before 9/11, Bush (43) also disregarded strong opinions from the FBI and INS and ordered the freeing from INS deportation custody of Virgilio Paz and Jose Dionisio Suarez. Both men had received twelve year sentences for confessing to conspiring with Chilean Secret Police officials to assassinate Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in a September 1976 car-bombing in Washington DC.

But a photograph showed a lesser terrorist actually sharing the platform with President Bush. According to a former, federal law enforcement official, the Prez must have told the Secret Service to find a seat for "that good old boy."

This referred to Sixto Reinaldo Aquit Manrique (aka El Chino Aquit). The Secret Service apparently seated Aquit, arrested in Florida in 1994, a few rows behind the President as he spoke.

After his speech, Bush attended a $25,000-a-couple Florida Republican Party dinner to help finance the reelection campaign of his younger brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is running for re-election. Some of the big donors, members of the governing board of the Cuban American National Foundation, have also financed terrorists like Bosch and his erstwhile partner in the airplane bombing, Luis Posada Carriles. That's what Carriles told Anne Bardach of the July 12-13, 1998 New York Times

We've gotten used to the war on terrorism as a fact of daily life, inured ourselves to the security procedures following 9/11, the long airport waits, the somewhat embarrassing "wanding" process and even the routine shoe removal and carry-on bag search. Some of us even suppress yawns when Attorney General Ashcroft or Homeland Security Tsar Tom Ridge warn of the next imminent terrorist attack and encourage us to join TIPS, a national informers' association to spy on neighbors and anyone who might be suspicious.

Why then does the Secret Service not apply a standard set of rules? The answer, according to a former FBI Special Agent, is that the President told the Secret Service that there are good former terrorists especially those who strongly backed his younger brother Jeb for reelection as Florida governor and bad ones.

"There's no way the Secret Service didn't know that the man had been busted for a terrorist rap," the former federal police officer said. Indeed, the Miami Herald (Nov 4, 1994), on November 2, 1994, reported that the FBI anti-terrorism squad nailed Aquit after he and two colleagues had "pulled up to a Southwest Dade warehouse...armed with 10 gallons of gas, fuses, and a loaded semiautomatic handgun." The story cited police saying "the men smashed a window and tried to get inside before officers moved in."

Miami Herald reporter Gail Epstein cited FBI Special Agent Paul Miller of the FBI's Terrorism Task Force who said "there was enough fuel to destroy several warehouses." The warehouse stored supplies for the Pastors for Peace who intended to ship them to Cuba.

In 1993, according to Cuban authorities, Aquit fired a 50 caliber machine gun at a Cypriot tanker in Cuban waters off the province of Matanzas. The UN Rapporteur cited this event in his 1994 annual report on human rights in Cuba.

Aquit proudly claims membership in the anti-Castro Secret Armed Army. He was tried and convicted and sentenced to five years by a Florida court. But, according to El Nuevo Herald reporter Cynthia Corzo, the state office of the public prosecutor let Aquit and his terrorist co-conspirators off with two years of house arrest (allowing them to go to work, church or to the market) followed by three years of probation and an additional 150 hours of community service.

More importantly, Aquit's terrorist actions took on near epic status for the violent anti-Castroites when the President apparently made a special exception and contradicted his own rules in the war against terrorism. Or did Bush omit a paragraph in his speeches that specifies that the "terrorism" charge applies only to those who have an Abu or Bin in their names?

Those who have followed the course of Bush's "war against terrorism" will appreciate the nuance that he has aimed his aggression at violent Islamic people, not at violent anti-Castro Cubans whose patriotic zeal impels them to use explosives against targets located in the United States. By inviting Bosch and placing Aquit on the platform with him, Bush acknowledged his debt to certain Miami Cubans. What's a long history of terrorism compared to loyalty to the Bush family?

The Bush family rewards those who help their campaigns and helps them get asylum and prestige if they are criminals or high level appointments if they merely represent criminals. Bush appointed the Cuban-born Otto Reich Interim Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs after the Senate refused to confirm him. He has made several Cabinet and sub-Cabinet appointments of prominent Cubans as well like Commerce Secretary Mel Martinez.

He even moved the ubiquitous Reich to a National Security Council job after a Republican-controlled Senate told him to ditch the ultra reactionary whose policies aimed at hurting Fidel Castro, not helping the United States and helped give the Administration a bad name throughout Latin America. In April of 2002, various newspapers reported that Reich had collaborated with the unsuccessful Venezuelan putschists that tried to kidnap and then replace elected President Hugo Chavez.

In is State of the Union, Bush called Saddam Hussein an imminent threat because he was arming terrorists. He also had unkind words for the Iranian regime, part of his infamous Axis of Evil. I wondered if he had forgotten that his own father had helped send weapons of mass destruction to an even more radical Islamic government in Iran during the Iran-Contra affair of the mid 1980s.

I wondered as well if he had forgotten that several of his top level appointments had gone to men who had participated in the illegal arming of the Iranian government: John Poindexter, head of TIPS (the ultra secret snitch operation), Elliot Abrams, now a policy planner, John Negroponte, the UN Ambassador and of course the omnipresent Reich.

So, count on Bush to reward his old friends no matter what their role in previous harboring or arming of terrorists and also rely on him give anti-Castro terrorists get out of jail passes and opportunities to share his platform as long as they don't have Arab-sounding names.

With this kind of presidential support it is small wonder that no jury in south Florida convicts anti-Castro Cubans any more. Indeed, the juries down there award them large settlements in cases that other juries and judges would laugh at or just throw out of court. In a default judgment

Fidel Castro didn't show up for the trial because he claimed the court lacked jurisdiction --in late January, a south Florida jury awarded $40 plus million in damages to Jose Basulto, founder of Brothers to the Rescue. In February 1996, Cuban MIGs shoot down two planes flown by Brothers' pilots. Basulto escaped. Like Bosch and Aquit, Basulto has a long record of violence. He told a Florida court just two years ago, however that he had converted to pacifism, except for Cuba where violence was necessary.

In December 2002, a Cuban hijacked a plane and flew it safely through the Florida radar and landed. He got a hero's welcome and a shifty lawyer filed suit demanding that the plane, Cuban state property, be auctioned off and the proceeds given to his "emotionally wounded" client. What a precedent for skyjacking planes! What a lesson for prospective terrorists! The violent anti-Castroites, dense as they are, have noted the different standards Bush has set for them and the other terrorists.

I told my wife that the scriptwriters for The Sopranos, HBO's hit program about the life of a mafia gangster, his family, friends and world, must have spent time in South Florida courtrooms. In one episode, a mob guy informs a juror at the trial of Tony Soprano's uncle that he has a nice family and he hopes they live a long and prosperous life sufficient to insure that the juror will vote not guilty in the government's absolutely airtight case against Tony's uncle.

Is life imitating TV? "The Sopranos" is a well-produced farce. Real life is not as well scripted.

Saul Landau teaches at Cal Poly Pomona University and is a fellow of the Institute for Policy Studies. His October 2001 film, IRAQ: VOICES FROM THE STREETS, is distributed by Cinema Guild, 1-800-723-5522. For more discussion on this article and to see what others have to say click on the link below to go to discussion forums.