Post To Unscrupulous Viagra Purveyors: We’ve Got Our Eye On You

The New York Post reports that Hezbollah sleeper cells are active in the city:

The Hezbollah terror group — one of the most dangerous in the world — may be planning to activate sleeper cells in New York and other big cities to stage an attack as the nuclear showdown with Iran heats up, sources told The Post.

The FBI and Justice Department have launched urgent new probes in New York and other cities targeting members of the Lebanese terror group.

Law-enforcement and intelligence officials told The Post that about a dozen hard-core supporters of Hezbollah have been identified in recent weeks as operating in the New York area.

Sources said the activities of these New York-based operatives are being monitored by FBI counterterrorism agents as part of a nationwide effort to prevent a possible terror strike if the confrontation with Iran over its nuclear program spins out of control.

Additional law-enforcement attention is being centered on the Iranian Mission to the United Nations, where there have already been three episodes in the last four years in which diplomats and security guards have been expelled for casing and photographing New York City subways and other potential targets.

. . .

Hezbollah has so far limited its activities in the United States to fund-raising and criminal enterprises. The FBI has already taken down two major rings, one in Charlotte, N.C., and one in Detroit, in which members were smuggling cigarettes, Viagra and baby formula, and kicking profits back to Hezbollah.

Bombers To Homeless: Drop Dead

More proof that the Yankees are evil:

Yankees apparel and a shave was the disguise of choice for would-be bombers planning to blow up the Herald Square subway station, according to court testimony yesterday.

The idea was that “we should not look like Muslims, we should look like regular people,” Osama El-Dawoody, an NYPD informant, said in Brooklyn Federal Court.

El-Dawoody spent his third day on the witness stand providing an overview for hours of secretly recorded conversations with alleged bomber wanna-be Shahawar Matin Siraj in the summer of 2004 as details of the plot took shape.

Siraj, 24, suggested that the 50-year-old El-Dawoody would look more discreet by trading his kufi — a Muslim headpiece — for a baseball cap.

“Wear, like, this kind of stuff with the New York Yankees on it or something,” Siraj said.

Don’t worry, though, because the plot gets stupider and stupider:

According to their plan, the bomber would take the F train to the 42nd St. station and place an explosive device in a garbage can. Then he would board another train to the 34th St. station, place a second device in the garbage or a toilet there and take the train to the Broadway-Lafayette St. station.

It was unclear whether the bombs would be triggered by remote control or timers.

Siraj said he hoped the explosion would “take down” the shopping mall above the Herald Square station.

Idiots! No one actually uses the Manhattan Mall! No matter:

Killing people was not their main goal. They had hoped to minimize casualties by striking in the early-morning hours on the weekend when the stations subways were mostly deserted — except for the homeless, the tapes show.

“You cannot save [the] homeless,” Siraj said.

These guys sound very American, actually, with this you-cannot-save-the-homeless bootstrapper talk . . .

Stupid-Frightening Is The Ying-Yang Of Our Post 9/11 World

Like many things these days, whatever happened was either incredibly stupid or incredibly scary:

[Staten Island resident Debra] Sander . . . made the unsettling discovery after flying JetBlue Airways from Newark to Tampa to spend the Easter holiday with her siblings.

When she arrived with her young son at her brother Willy’s home in Clearwater, she began unpacking — only to find a strange white, button-down shirt lying atop her own clothes.

“I thought it was weird,” said Ms. Sander, who initially believed she had mistakenly packed a shirt of her husband’s.

Then she noticed badges, lettering and insignia identical to that of the [Transportation Security Administration]. Also attached to the shirt was someone’s name tag and ID number.

. . .

According to Ms. Sander, her suitcase has a TSA-approved combination lock for which only the agency is supposed to have a universal key.

“Either somebody with the TSA is lying or someone who isn’t a member of homeland security has a universal key to the lock,” said Ms. Sander.

She said that a few people to whom she told the story tossed around conspiracy theories that perhaps the shirt was misplaced by a terrorist who had intended to deliver the item to a colleague.

“After 9/11, anything is possible,” she said. “But the best possible scenario is that it was done by an irresponsible worker. Then maybe they shouldn’t be working there.”

What’s In Your Wallet?

One of “the largest and most prominent banks” in the city is responsible for funneling $3 billion to terrorists, the Post reports:

Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau has shut down a massive terror-finance pipeline in which a whopping $3 billion in profits from drug deals and other crimes flowed through a major New York bank to Middle East fanatics, The Post has learned.

Morgenthau told The Post his office is pursuing a settlement involving possible penalties against one of the largest and most prominent banks in New York — which he declined to identify — for maintaining an account where funds that originated in South America’s notorious “tri-border region” were rerouted to suspect accounts in the Middle East.

Evidence developed in the course of a three-year probe, which has already resulted in charges against other New York-based financial institutions, revealed that about $3 billion that flowed through the account over a two-year period was going to terror groups Hamas, al Qaeda and Hezbollah, Morgenthau said.

“I can’t go out and arrest Osama bin Laden. But I can try to cut off his money,” Morgenthau said of his massive probe.

. . .

John Moscow, a former Assistant District Attorney for financial crimes under Morgenthau, told the House International Relations Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations last week that there are hundreds of thousands of shady banks around the world that “are taking deposits from people they never met and from brass-plate companies with no assets except the bank account, and are inserting the money into the world monetary system.”

“Most of this is in dollars, and most of it goes through Manhattan,” Moscow testified. Morgenthau would not name the latest New York bank under the gun, but said the case could be concluded — with possible penalties — “any day now.”

He said most of the $3 billion in suspicious funds were generated, through criminal enterprises, in the lawless tri-border region of Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay.

Over a two-year period, the $3 billion was sent to the New York bank account by a shadowy money-transmittal company in Montevideo, Uruguay.

The money then flowed into bank accounts in the Middle East locations including Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Beirut, Lebanon, and Ramallah in the Palestinian territories.

I Still Think Yale Wins . . .

First, Yale enrolls a former Taliban official to study. Not to be outdone, Columbia invites Libyan, um, leader Muammar Gadhafi to participate in a symposium on “The Prospects for Democracy” in the latest Ivy League competition to see who can piss off the New York Sun more:

A Columbia University discussion on democracy in the 21st century that included an hour-long speech by the dictator of Libya was co-sponsored by an institute named after his manifesto, which states, “All existing forms of government are undemocratic.”

In the manifesto, called “The Green Book,” Muammar Gadhafi goes on to write that “the masses struggle to eliminate the various forms of existing dictatorships,” which include “one-party, two-party or multi-party systems of government, which all inappropriately call themselves democracies.”

During an hour-long speech delivered via satellite at “The Prospects for Democracy” conference, Mr. Gadhafi explained violently cracking down on political opponents, saying, “In our countries, the opposition takes the form of explosions, assassinations, killing,” he said, according to the AP.

Audience members received the dictator “politely,” the dean of the university’s School for International and Public Affairs, Lisa Anderson, who moderated the event, said. She said his remarks are “what you would expect from the author of ‘The Green Book.'”

The two-day conference was co-sponsored by the university, The Green Book Center, the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, and al-Fatah University in Libya.

. . .

Ms. Anderson said she hoped the conference marked the beginning of a “scholarly collaboration” between the American and Libyan academic communities.

. . .

When asked what impact the conference may have on Libya’s reputation, Ms. Anderson said, “It didn’t hurt.” She dismissed the notion, though, that it gave Mr. Gadhafi legitimacy. “We’re not in the business of thinking about that,” she said. “I hope we have continued relations with the Libyan academic community. That’s good for us and good for them.”

This also serves to note that writer Azi Paybarah has successfully parlayed his stand against the New York Press’ decision not to run those Danish cartoons into a job at the Sun. Good for him!