Suspicious envelopes were mailed to US embassies including those in Brussels, Berlin, Rome, Bucharest, Rome, Dublin, Oslo and Riga, the Latvian capital.
To be watched, combined with Paris' shoppingmall-bomb-alerts, other big cities are the object of attention ... christmas holidays are excellent times to put some more fear into people, preparing and exercising the game.
The White House has prepared more than a dozen contingency plans to help guide President-elect Barack Obama if an international crisis erupts in the opening days of his administration, part of an elaborate operation devised to smooth the first transition of power since Sept. 11, 2001.
The US Vice-President, Dick Cheney, said he was directly involved in approving severe interrogation methods used by the CIA and that the prison at Guantanamo Bay should remain open indefinitely.
Titled ´Known Unknowns: Unconventional Strategic Shocks in Defense Strategy Development,´ the report warned that the U.S. military and intelligence community remain mired in the past as well as the need to accommodate government policy. Freier, a former Pentagon official, said that despite the Al Qaida surprise in 2001 U.S. defense strategy and planning remain trapped by “excessive convention.”
"My position is it is regrettable that any Americans died. It is regrettable that they had to die, but I believe they did have to die. The threat we knew about was the chemical capability that Saddam Hussein had used against his own people. The potential for biological agents were real. There was evidence that there was an ongoing nuclear program, we had been surprised at how far advanced it was before. The danger was inaction could have resulted in the death of a great many more Americans than 4,000. And that’s the reason I’m still delighted that we did what we did.”