Anti Terrorist

The wires from the polygraph machine had come off, and finally the intense questioning by investigators from the Central Intelligence Agency was over. Robert Cleare, an American spy who had once been on the CIA's career fast track, had just endured a combined total of 19 hours of interrogation by his employer. Yet even as his grilling was completed in the fall of 1993, Cleare's troubles were just beginning.

The U.S. military should share with civilian architects the lessons it has learned about protecting sensitive government buildings from terrorist attacks, including ways of strengthening a structure's lower floors to make it bomb-resistant, a new government report says.

President Clinton on Monday denounced the National Rifle Assn. in his bluntest language yet, saying that the powerful gun lobby should be "ashamed" for describing federal agents as "jackbooted government thugs" in a fund-raising letter. Clinton renewed his attack on critics of federal law enforcement during a somber ceremony for fallen police officers, saying that no one has a right to "run down" law enforcement "or to suggest that it is somehow all right for them to be put in harm's way."

Highlights of President Clinton's new anti-terrorism measures: Hire 1,000 new agents, prosecutors and other federal law enforcement and support personnel to investigate, deter and prosecute terrorist activity. Require within a year that microscopic particles be placed in certain raw materials used in making bombs to make it easier for police to trace the source of explosive devices after detonation. Study whether common materials used in bombs, such as fertilizer, can be made non-explosive.

The bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City has injected new urgency into the debate over the nation's immigration laws and is expected to lead to swift and significant changes in immigration and counterterrorism policies, according to lawmakers and other legal experts. It has not yet been determined whether international causes or grievances had a role in the blast or whether any recent immigrants to this country were involved.

During his two years as administrator of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, James Lee Witt has presided over 62 disasters: fires, floods, earthquakes, hurricanes and tornadoes. But he had never seen anything like what he saw here Thursday: a disaster caused not by nature but by "somebody meaner than hell."

The German Parliament met in special session Monday to watch Manfred Kanther being sworn in as the country's new interior minister and, in the debate that followed, heard him vow to clear up the scandal that brought him into the Cabinet--the killing of a terrorist suspect two weeks ago. "The government wants a fast and complete clarification of all circumstances, as fast as possible, without any ifs, ands or buts," Kanther told lawmakers in Bonn. "That will happen."

While progress has been made in upgrading airline and airport security, there still isn't a foolproof system or device on the horizon that will insure total safety for air passengers. That was among the findings in a 142-page report, "Technology Against Terrorism: Structuring Security," prepared by the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and released earlier this year. Several chapters of the report are devoted to aviation security.

They call themselves the Pico-Union 21. In court, they looked like a ragtag band of harmless radicals, most of them members of a tiny revolutionary Communist organization. Yet the criminal charges they faced were serious: rioting, resisting arrest, assault with a deadly weapon on a police officer. Prosecutors rarely drop such charges, especially when the alleged victims are police. But that is what happened in Los Angeles Municipal Court late last month.

A Greek court, guided by the long arm of American law, meted out justice Wednesday in memory of a Japanese schoolboy murdered by a terrorist bomb on a U.S. jumbo jet nearly a decade ago. By a 2-1 vote, the three-judge court found Palestinian Mohammed Rashid, 41, guilty of the premeditated murder of 15-year-old Toru Ozawa aboard a Pan Am plane flying between Tokyo and Honolulu in 1982.