Cole

TERRORISM WATCH:
@ Earth First claimed responsibility for the Christmas Day fire that destroyed an 8,000-square foot office building used by the Boise Cascade company to manage timber in the northwest. No one was hurt. Earth First said it had used "four buckets of diesel fuel set off by a kitchen timer".
@ Abdel Ghani (arrested as an accomplice to Ahmed Ressam) was denied bail in a 31 Dec hearing. He is accused of living in the US illegally, conspiracy to use phony credit cards, conspiracy to cover up his involvement in Ressam's operations, and being a member of a terrorist organization. Ressam had a slip of paper with the name "Ghani" and the telephone number for Ghani's home at the time of his arrest. Ghani was reportedly in Seattle under the name of Eduardo Rocha during 11-16 Dec; Ressam as arrested on the 14th. French intelligence, which has been tracking Algerian groups for decades, said that Ressam was "a mule ... a simpleton" who could be risked carrying explosives across the border without risking a valuable inner member of the terrorist group.
@ Algerian Abdel Hakim Tizegha was charged on 3 Jan for trying to enter the US illegally, and may face bomb-related charges linked to the Ahmed Ressam incident. He was arrested on 24 Dec while trying to enter the same crossing point (Blaine, in Washington State) that Ressam had used. He had been held in administrative detention for over a week; the charges allow him to be held until an investigation into terrorist links is completed. Tizegha is known to be an associate of Ghani and has been linked to Ressam.
@ Just as the US was shocked by a series of Algerians trying to infiltrate the US border for possible terrorist acts, the Border Patrol announced that it had only been able to hire 369 new agents, far short of the 1,000 Congress ordered it to recruit. While the Immigration and Naturalization Service blamed the booming economy, the General Accounting Office said that the INS was "slow to react" when its recruiting efforts were clearly failing.
@ Abdelwahib Hamdouche, who holds French citizenship but is of Algerian origins, was arrested on 4 Jan as he tried to board a flight to Paris at Kennedy Airport. He is listed as a "material witness to a bombing investigation" and authorities want to force him to testify against other Algerians. A federal judge ordered him held without bond, even though he