Stephanopoulos says that the White House keeps saying that they don't want these rebels to have "shoulder fired missiles" (ha, you mean we can't trust them with our commercial-airlines-destroying shoulder fired missiles? I wonder why?) and that the rebels are already getting enough support from other Gulf states.
PAGE A12 Missile Threat Examined Investigators are trying to determine whether flights can be protected from terrorists armed with shoulder-fired missiles.
To avoid any risk of Israeli aircraft being targeted if weapons fell into the wrong hands, the plan would not have provided rebels with shoulder-fired missiles.
Last November a suicide bomb attack on an Israeli-owned hotel near Mombasa coincided with a failed attempt to bring down an Israeli airplane with shoulder-fired missiles.
Captain Brannon was interested in whether the crew of the Liman was equipped with shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles as it prepared to leave for the Balkans.
But the discovery of the empty missile canister prompted an F.B.I. alert that terrorists might try to shoot down a commercial aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles.
The second conspiracy specification rejected by the panel asserted that Mr. Hamdan was part of a conspiracy to kill Americans in Afghanistan in 2001 with shoulder-fired missiles.
"Open-source documents suggest that most if not all terrorist surface-to-air missile attacks on civilian aircraft were committed with shoulder-fired systems, not crew-portable or vehicle-mounted systems," he wrote, by e-mail.
In recent weeks, they have seized several military bases and shot down military aircraft, reportedly with shoulder-fired missiles, but there is no end in sight to the war.
A 76-year-old New York jeweler pleaded guilty on Tuesday to operating an illegal money-transferring business in what prosecutors said was a scheme to provide terrorists with shoulder-fired missiles that could bring down commercial aircraft.
The Homeland Security Department said on Tuesday that it had picked three teams of companies to try to adapt military antimissile systems to protect airliners in an effort to counter the threat of terrorists with shoulder-fired missiles near airports.
