Dinah Lord

Turkey: Syrian man arrested in Obama murder plot

Well, we may not be at war with Islam, President Obama, but it sure looks like they're still out to kill your a$$. 

From AKI:

As United States president Barack Obama began an official visit to Turkey on Monday, reports surfaced that a Syrian man was arrested in Istanbul in connection with a plot to kill him. The man - who sought to disguise himself as a journalist for the Arab TV network Al-Jazeera - managed to obtain press accreditation and allegedly planned to stab the US president with a knife, said Saudi daily al-Watan.

The Saudi daily contacted Al-Jazeera's bureau in the Turkish capital Ankara and spoke with the bureau's director Yusuf al-Sharif who claimed the Syrian man never worked with Al-Jazeera.

The suspect was arrested last Friday in Istanbul, where he had been permanently living for a number of years. After his arrest, al-Watan said he confessed to having planned Obama's murder and that in case he failed, there were three other accomplices that would carry out the assassination.

Obama arrived in Ankara late on Sunday for a two-day trip to shore up ties with majority-Muslim Turkey, whose support is crucial to the US to solve the conflicts in Iran, Afghanistan and the Middle East.

He is due to meet Turkish president Abdullah Gul and prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Obama was also due to visit the Turkish parliament and address the general assembly.

2:32 pm Update from Today's Zaman:

Meanwhile, two Syrian nationals purported to be in preparations of an attack against President Obama were reportedly detained by the İstanbul police on Saturday. According to a story that was published in Sunday's Habertürk daily, the Turkish police and the CIA unearthed a plan of four individuals using fake identity cards belonging to the Al Jazeera television station to follow the US president's visit as journalists and kill Obama by throwing a knife at him during the president's Alliance of Civilizations meeting at the Çırağan Palace scheduled for tonight. Three others were being sought by the police yesterday in İstanbul, where the police have been carrying out extensive security operations to make sure that the visit passes without a hitch.

UK: Re-establishes intelligence links w/ Syria

Seems to me they are just inviting the wolf into the hen house...wonder how Lebanon is feeling right about now.

Britain re-established high-level intelligence links with the Syrian authorities as David Miliband made his landmark visit to Damascus yesterday, according to senior Syrian officials.

The move, first raised earlier this year at a meeting in New York between the Foreign Secretary and his Syrian counterpart, Walid Moualem, was a key objective of the Syrian visit. The newly revived intelligence relationship could be hugely beneficial to Britain. Syria is known to have one of the best intelligence-gathering systems in the Middle East, in particular in tracking the movements of Islamic extremists into Iraq and around the region.

Syria: It's official. Uranium found at bomb site.

But it's still "inconclusive," says El Baradei.  He needs more "transparency from Syria" and more "information from Israel."  Good luck with that, chief.

IAEA chief Mohamed El Baradei confirmed that the radioactive material was found at the site, but said the source was inconclusive

"It's not highly enriched uranium. It could have come from so many different ways," he told reporters in Dubai. "That's why we're looking at so many different scenarios."

Uranium can be found naturally in low concentrations and must be "enriched" before it can be used in either power plants or nuclear weapons. Highly enriched uranium is the type used in atomic bombs.

Source - FOXNews.com

Syria: It's the Jooos!

Syria’s foreign minister suggested Wednesday that Israeli bombs may be the source of uranium traces that diplomats at the UN nuclear agency said were found at a suspected nuclear site.

source - Today's Zaman