holds a jubilee celebration every 25 years.) --Stephen V Cole

US authorities arrested three men and a Canadian woman at the Blaine border crossing near Seattle late on 26 Dec. The Canadian woman parked her car in Canada and walked across the border, where she met with three men. Customs officials arrested all four, although it was not clear why. The three men were in the US illegally, and had driven to Washington state from Pennsylvania in a rental car. Former CIA Director James Woolsey said that the Agency's own rules had kept it from properly monitoring foreign terrorist groups. Woolsey noted that new rules imposed by President Clinton in 1995 made it all but impossible to recruit as an informant anyone who had been a human rights violator. Woolsey noted that as virtually everyone inside a terrorist group was guilty of violating human rights, these rules made it impossible to subvert anyone from such a group into informing on his cohorts. The Agency insists that the rules are not a problem since supervisors can authorize such contacts, but Woolsey insists that this permission is given so rarely that provisions to ask for it might as well not exist. --Stephen V Cole

January 7, 2000; Paraguayan police launched an anti-terrorist operation only a few days before Christmas. Targets of the operation were radical Moslem extremists who have, over the last two decades, set up a network in the tri-border (Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina) area. [This area has been known for a century as a lawless zone populated in part by criminals and smugglers.] The Moslem extremists from Hezbollah and Hamas were reportedly planning millennium attacks on US and Israeli targets in Argentina, hopefully derailing the peace process. --Stephen V