Maher Arar was interviewed on WNYC --Randy at Beautiful Horizens has the details.

And if you believe this, we have a bridge to sell you.

Via Buzzflash: UPI in Berlin reports that Osama bin Laden has been captured:

BERLIN, Jan. 22 (UPI) -- Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has been captured, Germany's Die Welt newspaper reported Thursday. The newspaper, on its Web site, cited "unconfirmed reports" as the basis for its report.

Update: Maybe they were referring to the capture of Hassan Ghul:

Hassan Ghul, described as the most senior associate of Osama bin Laden found in Iraq, was picked up last week in the northern part of the country by Kurdish forces, the official said. "He was a senior facilitator who was caught coming into the country," the official said. Speculation was that Ghul, a Pakistani, was scouting out what al Qaeda could do in the future against U.S. forces, the official said.

Update: Thanks to commenter Jer who provides this link to The U.S. Denies It.

Bump and Update: The Washington Post has the latest.

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Original Post 1/18 9:00 pm

Newsweek's Michael Isikoff and Daniel Klaidman write of the FBI's new theory on the identity of the 20th hijacker and how he got away. He is a Saudi named al-Qahtani, who in late August, 2001 was turned away trying to enter the U.S. in Orlando. The FBI now thinks he was to be the 20th hijacker on United Airlines Flight 93, which crashed Pennsylvania on 9/11.

9/11 ringleader Muhammad Atta was at the Orlando airport that same day and made a call on a pay phone to a Mideastern country—apparently concerned that his guest hadn't gotten off the airplane. A surveillance camera captured Atta making the call. Months later, a Saudi by the same name—al-Qahtani—was captured by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and flown to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where investigators later ID'd him as the man in Orlando.

....The Feds once thought [Zacarias] Moussaoui was the 20th hijacker—a theory they quietly abandoned last year when they concluded al-Qahtani was more likely the real one.

The Toronto Star justly takes new Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin to task for his kow-towing to Bush in the wake of the Maher Arar affair:

When he became prime minister, he vowed, a Maher Arar scenario — where a Canadian citizen changing planes in New York was arrested, detained by U.S. authorities and deported to Syria to be tortured for a year — would never happen again.

"It's very, very important that the Canadian passport be respected and that effectively, Canadian citizens when they find themselves in this kind of difficulty, that if they're going to be sent home, they should be sent home to Canada," Martin said six weeks ago.

He called it "simply unacceptable" that the U.S. would deport a Canadian citizen to a third country and hinted broadly that if the Americans didn't come around, the Canadian government might have to rethink the practice of sharing security information with Washington.

Martin and Bush met yesterday in Mexico. Martin came away with far less than an agreement. He got bupkis-- a letter containing zero assurances:

We received this by email, we don't know the source, but it made us laugh, so we're reprinting it:

At New York's Kennedy airport today, an individual later discovered to be a public school teacher was arrested trying to board a flight while in possession of a ruler, protractor, setsquare, sliderule, and calculator.

At a morning press conference, Attorney general John Ashcroft said he believes the man is a member of the notorious al-gebra movement. He is being charged by the FBI with carrying weapons of math instruction.

"Al-gebra is a fearsome cult," Ashcroft said. "They desire average solutions by means and extremes, and sometimes go off on tangents in a search of absolute value. They use secret code names like "x" and "y" and refer to themselves as "unknowns", but we have determined they belong to a common denominator of the axis of medieval with coordinates in every country."

"As the Greek philanderer Isosceles used to say, there are 3 sides to every triangle," Ashcroft declared. When asked to comment on the arrest, President Bush said, "If God had wanted us to have better weapons of math instruction, He would have given us more fingers and toes."

A land mine was found in an army sergeant's luggage during a routine check of an American Airlines flight on which he was a passenger.

DENVER (AP) - A 24-year-old Army sergeant was removed from an American Airlines flight after an inert land mine was found in his checked baggage, the Transportation Safety Administration said.

TSA screeners noticed the land mine Friday, pulled the bag from the luggage system at Denver International Airport and confiscated the mine, TSA spokesman Mike Fierberg said. No flights were delayed. The soldier, whose name was not released, could face civil penalties for trying to put a prohibited item aboard a flight, Fierberg said. No criminal charges would be filed, he said. The man was released by police, but the airline refused to allow him aboard his flight to Dallas, Fierberg said.

Why would a soldier in the U.S. have a land mine in his possession? As a souvenir?

[comments now closed]

Nightline is devoting its program this evening to an examination of 9/11 legal issues, including the Padilla, Hamdi and Zacarias Moussaoui cases. The show is called Legal Limbo.

The Supreme Court has announced it will hear an appeal from Yaser Hamdi; he was born in the U.S., captured in Afghanistan, and has been held without charges as an "enemy combatant." Meanwhile "20th hijacker" Zacharias Moussoui is being tried in the American judicial system, and Jose Padilla continues to be held as an "enemy combatant."

Is the country strong enough to use the judicial measures already in place or do the events of 9/11 require a fundamental shift in the judicial process? .... This is an issue that every American has a stake in....

Smile for the camera. Over here. Prints Please. Those are the instructions that will be greeting foreigners to the U.S. Monday. And every day after. And that will cause more and more flight delays for the rest of us. It's all part of United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology (US_VISIT).

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security says the goal of the US VISIT program is to track the millions of people who come to the United States every year on business, student and tourist visas -- and to use the information as a tool against terrorists.

....Critics say the broad-reaching program will cause unnecessary travel delays and may never prove to be effective. "There's so much information in such volumes that there's a limit to what any analyst can absorb," said Larry Johnson, an aviation security consultant.

Faiz Rehman, president of the National Council of Pakistani-Americans, points to the disruption in travel. "Without proper training, there will be long lines, there will be missed flights, there will be people who would be wrongly stopped," Rehman said.

The backlash has already begun. Authorites in Brazil have declared that all American visitors to Brazil will meet the same conditions.

Will the program work?

Tim Edgar, a critic of the program and legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said it will not take the place of improved intelligence gathering. "The problem with 9/11 is that we didn't know who the terrorists were," Edgar said. "We could have put them through this system and they would have gotten through without any problem."

What's it costing? Just $368 million.

For an interesting view, take a look at this article, At What Price Security from Liberal Slant.

A new tape has surfaced, purportedly of Osama bin Laden, who makes reference to the capture of Saddam Hussein.

In the new tape, the speaker said to be bin Laden warned that unless the United States was stopped, it would go on occupying Saudi Arabia and the entire oil-rich Gulf region after Iraq. There can be no dialogue with the occupiers except with weapons," the speaker said.

He urged Muslims to resort to jihad, or holy war, to "repel the huge conspiracies woven against our nation" -- from "the crusaders' occupation of Baghdad using the weapons of mass destruction deceit ... to the fierce attempt to crush the jihad and the mujahedeen in beloved Palestine using the deceit of the roadmap and the Geneva peace initiative."

The United States was feverishly going after "those who raise the banner of jihad under the guise of fighting terrorism, with the help of the hypocrites, because they all know that jihad is the potent force that can thwart all plots," the speaker said.

So, Osama likely is still alive. Are Bush and Rumsfeld any closer to finding him?

The Guardian reports it has reviewed a memo from British Airways stating it will refuse to fly its planes with armed guards aboard. The airline cites threats to passengers.

A spokesman for the British Air Line Pilots Association (Balpa), which also opposes the policy, said BA's statement was expected to be followed by other airlines and would rule out the use of sky marshals, as proposed.

'We now believe sky marshals will never fly,' said the spokesman. 'If you're told there's a perceived risk, you're not going to run it. No one in their right mind would say "Don't worry, we'll put sky marshals aboard it".'

In related news, the Observer has this article Sunday on the hunt for the British terror cell:

Intercepts from a Western intelligence agency seen by The Observer reveal that jihadists regard London as a key financing and recruiting centre for their efforts. Although Whitehall sources strongly denied suggestions that UK passport holders were suspected in the threat to British Airways, telephone intercepts seen by this newspaper make clear that Islamist terror cells are deliberately targeting 'well-educated' foreigners, Britons among them.

In one call, an unidentified jihadist tells a colleague: 'We need foreigners. We have Albanians, Swiss and English... all that is important is that they are of a high cultural level ... businessmen, professors, engineers, doctors and teachers.'

One place we're glad we are not going to be on New Year's Eve is New York City. Their security precautions, even if necessary, make it sound more like a prelude to Soylent Green than a festive occasion. From the news article:

As part of the measures, low-flying planes and helicopters will be banned from the area, manhole covers will be welded shut, and garbage cans, newspaper vending machines and mailboxes will be removed from street corners, a police official said. Snipers will be posted on rooftops, heavily armed groups of officers known as Hercules Teams will patrol the area along with thousands of uniformed officers, and hundreds of plainclothes officers will mix with the crowd, officials said.

The police will draw a tight perimeter around the city, with increased truck checkpoints and stepped-up Harbor Unit patrols on waterways. In addition to the Homeland Security air patrols, the Police Department's eight helicopters will be in the air, including a sophisticated new one with a powerful video camera that can give commanders on the ground an eye in the sky, officials said.

The police will use Sanitation Department sand trucks and other vehicles to block off side streets around Times Square. And a special National Guard civil support team, trained to respond to attacks by chemical, biological and radiological weapons, will be in the area, officials said.