Nuclear terror suspect is top physicist

[IndianaGreen]

Source: The Independent (UK)

Nuclear terror suspect is top physicist

Was a leading scientist working on Cern's Large Hadron Collider plotting with al-Qa'ida to sabotage sites in France? John Lichfield in Paris reports

Sunday, 11 October 2009

The scientist suspected of plotting terrorist attacks on nuclear sites in France is a brilliant, internationally known physicist who has worked on research projects in Britain and the US, it emerged yesterday.

Adlène Hicheur, 32, who currently works on the "Big Bang" Large Hadron Collider experiment on the Swiss-French border, was once a research fellow at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Chilton, Oxfordshire. His name is attached to dozens of research papers presented at universities and nuclear research centres all over the world.

Mr Hicheur, and his brother, Zitouni, or Halim, also a highly qualified scientist, were arrested at their parents' home on a suburban council estate at Vienne, south of Lyons, on Thursday. French investigators say that advanced, internet "bugging" equipment allowed them to read, in "real time", emails exchanged between the brothers and the North African branch of al-Qa'ida. The messages are alleged to have contained, in recent days, suggested targets for attacks on nuclear sites in France and other countries "allied with the United States".

The brothers, French-born with devout, hard-working Algerian parents, fit a worrying pattern seen before in the arrest of suspected Islamist extremists in France. Far from being frustrated or unemployed young men from the margins of society, both Adlène and Halim had succeeded brilliantly in the French education system and taken up senior academic or research posts.

The younger brother, Halim, has a doctorate in physiology and the biomechanics of motion from the Pierre and Marie Curie University, Paris. He is now a research fellow at the Collège de France in Paris, France's most prestigious academic institution.

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/nuclear-terror-suspect-is-top-physicist-1800927.html

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Earlier LBN story:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=102&topic_id=4097274

[thunder rising]

1. French accuse Algerians. surpise! ... I'll wait for the rest of the story

[tocqueville]

2. once again the man is FRENCH

that he has Algerian ancestry is legally irrelevant.

and if you were more aware of what happens here, most Al Quaeda attacks or planned attacks against France have started from Algeria.

"According to Le Journal du Dimanche, citing a source close to the investigators, the researcher at the Center for Nuclear Research in Geneva (CERN) questioned for its relations with Algerian armed group, acknowledged the existence of encrypted exchanges with Al Qaeda activists of the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), formerly the GSPC (Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat) which joined the network headed by Osama bin Laden.

These encrypted messages suggest that this 32 years old researcher, was willing to participate in attacks aimed at France. He mentioned projects of attacks in the messages but still generally and without operational involvement. These attack projects had no connection with his work at CERN but were intended to mark the public by sticking to the news. Investigators are wondering if the young man of Algerian origin was not intended to act as "hub" of a future cell in Europe."

original here

http://www.lefigaro.fr/actualite-france/2009/10/09/01016-20091009ARTFIG00471-isere-l-un-des-terroristes-arrete-etait-chercheur-au-cern-.php

his brother has been liberated


so before you dismiss information in advance on pure prejudice, you might first look in your own backyard.

We don't have to INVENT the guys here

[acsmith]

19. he is algerian.

[bertman]

3. Muslims who are outraged over the support France gives to the U.S. in many of its

intelligence and anti-terror operations. Wow, what a surprise!! I can't understand why it seems so hard to understand that highly-educated individuals can also be keenly aware of the injustices perpetrated on others--even to the point of trying to be actively involved in fighting them.

Plus, Algerians would certainly have no reason to dislike the French. Right?

[tocqueville]

4. most Algerians LOVE the French

the fucking war is over. The FLN has bankrupted Algeria and their government is only sitting through nepotism and the military. Besides the FLN NEVER had the support of the majority of the population.

Ask the South-Vietnamese if they hate the French or Americans, you'll be surprised by the answer.

99% of the French Muslims are against Al Quaeda, as much as the US Muslims.

but you'll find morons anywhere

it's amazing how some parts of the left (in any country), jumps to conclusions for their opposition to war and finally in practice side with the enemy.

[bertman]

5. "but you'll find morons anywhere". Exactly. Even among highly-educated French citizens

of Algerian descent.

[jberryhill]

8. The Unabomber was as American as apple pie

It's not hard for highly educated scientists to develop a godlike sense of power due to their own mastery of their fields.

[tocqueville]

9. a highly educated person

can become a religious or political moron. Nothing new.

[hunter]

6. We've got plenty of highly educated fundamentalists here in the USA.

Look at the scientists -- some of them quite accomplished -- who speak out against the teaching of evolution in public schools. I have no doubt some of these people would become terrorists if they felt our government was cracking down on their own brands of religious extremism.

Irrational people respond in irrational ways even if they are highly gifted and disciplined in one particular area of the sciences.

[jberryhill]

7. I hate to say this but..

Particularly if they are highly gifted.

Having gone to grad school around a lot of phyicists, they can be a little on the odd side of the fence. They are almost as crazy as mathematicians, but slightly more practical minded.

Ted kaczinsky, the Unabomber, had a ph.d. in mathematics. So I'll give him and that grad student who killed his professor credit for being more practical minded in their violent insanity.

[hunter]

15. The Military Industrial Complex recruits the ones who are managebly crazy...

Death machine? No problem. I can build that.

Years and years ago, in the age of Saint Ronald Reagan the Witless, one of my favorite professors had quit the defense industry when he realized he was building radiation hardened electronics for the walking dead. Sure, yeah, why wouldn't the irradiated walking dead want to throw nukes at those that nuked them? Fair is fair.

He had endless nightmares about bleeding-out-of-every-orifice-out-of-their-minds military people activating the circuitry he designed.

Maybe, just maybe, he decided, he could figure out some way for all these angry people to avoid flinging neutron bombs at one another and he found himself a comfortable but lower paying academic job teaching computer science and x86 assembly language to bright young computer nerds. It was one of the most amazing engineering classes I ever took, it could have been called Pacifism 101. We even had a one-armed Purple Heart Pacifist Viet Nam Veteran. There were no women however, which is why I eventually changed my major to biology.

[jberryhill]

20. Agreed

It is why I left electrical engineering.

[boppers]

10. I call BullShit. 'advanced, internet "bugging" equipment...in "real time"'? *sigh*

Seeing network traffic in real time has been around longer than the freaking internet. Anybody with a laptop and any number of sniffer programs can do this. I was doing it in '88, my peers, *much* earlier.

Also, high energy particle physics is almost completely unrelated to nuclear weaponry. It's like claiming a podiatrist was part of a biological weapons ring because he mentioned physical toxins in an email.

This stinks in so many ways it's hard to describe.

[The abyss]

12. ROFLOL

Yes, agree

[hunter]

13. Yes. Much earlier.

:yoiks:

[boppers]

16. One person's debugger is another person's sniffer...

Why the "hide"?

[hunter]

21. I first signed onto the internet in 1979

The great success of intercepting and deciphering electronic communications during the Second World War had made a very strong impression on the U.S. intelligence community. A whole lot of "sniffing" was occurring years before "Total Information Awareness" and those mysterious locked rooms at AT&T.

The way to deal with it of course is to do everything in the open and not play spy games. The vermin don't like the light. I smell Bullshit too, I was agreeing with you, mostly because of all the spy talk. It's as distasteful as encountering Donald Rumsfeld masturbating behind a Bush.



http://w2.eff.org/Privacy/TIA

[JonQ]

11. Being brilliant in no way means

that you apply that brilliance in a logical or sane manner.


I have no doubt that most of the people we remember as truly evil in history have had higher than average intelligence.

[boppers]

17. "the people we remember as truly" (good?) "in history" ?

We remember those who shine more, because, uhm, they shine.

"Good" and "Evil" get applied later.

As does "smart", and "stupid"...

It has nothing to do with intelligence, or, rather, as long as intelligence is defined as getting money, power, fame, or credentials, the immensely intelligent farmer deep in an amazon forest never gets the same credit as the mildly gifted kid who went to Harvard and got a great "job".

[applegrove]

14. Worrisome news.

[jeffbr]

18. "measurement of the branching ratios of colour suppressed decays"

or "electronic width of the Upsilon particle" ain't gonna help you build a bomb.

Hicheur's work is typical run-of-the-mill phenomenological stuff. There have been thousands of experimental papers similar to the papers cited.