Lesson 5

1. Reading and Speaking. Read text 5 and render its content as if you were a witness of the terrorist attack, a police officer working in the Moscow subway, a neigbour of the suicide bomber, a reporter, a FSB agent, etc. Make use of the expressions in bold.

Text 5. Moscow metro explosions kill at least 35

By Philip P. Pan

Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, March 29, 2010; 2:42 AM

MOSCOW -- Two explosions shook crowded subway stations in central Moscow during the morning rush hour Monday, killing at least 35 people and injuring many others, according to local officials, who said early reports pointed to coordinated strikes by suicide bombers.

If confirmed, the blasts would represent the deadliest and most sophisticated terrorist attacks in the Russian capital in several years.

Officials said the first explosion occurred shortly before 8 a.m. at the Lubyanka subway station, killing 22 people. The second blast occurred about 45 minutes later at the Park Kultury station, located on the same line four stops away, killing at least 12 people, officials said.

Moscow's subway system, one of the most extensive and busiest in the world, with more than 7 million passengers daily, was targeted by militants linked to the separatist insurgency in Chechnya earlier in the decade, including in multiple suicide attacks in 2004 that killed dozens of people.

The city has enjoyed a respite from such violence in recent years, but Muslim radicals have stepped up their attacks in the North Caucasus region recently, including in Chechnya and neighboring Ingushetia and Dagestan. And in November, authorities blamed the insurgents for the bombing of a luxury train traveling between Moscow and St. Petersburg, which caused a derailment that killed at least 26 people.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

29/03/2010

2. Speaking. Talk about another recent bomb attack. Use the vocabulary from the text above:

• When and where did the bomb explode?

• Where was the explosive device planted?

• How many people were killed or wounded?

• Who was blamed on for the attack?

• Did any person/ group or organization take responsibility for the attack?

3. Reading and Writing. Tell about other subway attacks. Read the article and write a brief news report (not more than 3 paragraphs). Make use of the vocabulary in bold and from the article above (text 5).

Text 6. Sarin gas attack on the tokyo subway

The Sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway refers to the 1995 incident when members of AUM Shinrikyo released sarin gas on several lines of the Tokyo Subway in an act of domestic terrorism. 12 people died and some 6000 were injured as a result of the attack.

Sarin was first created in Nazi Germany. The volatile nerve agent is 500 times more toxic than cyanide: A single pinhead-size drop can kill an adult.

Only a select few cult members carried out the sarin attacks and the plan was kept secret from most of AUM's followers.

Monday, 20 March, 1995 was for most a normal workday, though the following day was a national holiday. The attack came at the peak of the Monday morning rush hour on one of the world's busiest commuter transport systems.

The liquid sarin was contained in plastic bags which each team then wrapped in newspapers. Each perpetrator carried two packets of sarin totalling approximately 1 litre of sarin, except Hayashi Yasuo, who carried three bags. The perpetrators boarded their appointed trains; at prearranged stations, each perpetrator dropped his package and punctured it several times with the sharpened tip of his umbrella before escaping to his accomplice's waiting get-away car. The liquid began vaporizing, and people began getting sick. Some of them got off the trains at subsequent stations, stumbling onto the platforms. At each stop, more gas spread, and more liquid was tracked off the trains and into the stations. When commuters began to collapse in the carriages, nobody looked at them. Many of those stricken by the gas continued to struggle to get to work, brought down on the stairs only by the fact that they were going blind and their legs refused to function. The deaths included a high proportion of subway workers, who tried to mop up the poison with paper to get the trains moving again: yes, this was a terror attack, but the important thing was the timetable. Loyalty to collective causes prevented correct assessment and management of the emergency.

Witnesses have said that subway entrances resembled battlefields. In many cases, the injured simply lay on the ground, many unable to breathe. Incredibly, several of those affected by sarin went to work in spite of their symptoms. Most of these left and sought medical treatment as the symptoms worsened.

Several of those affected were exposed to sarin only by helping passengers from the trains (these include passengers on other trains and health care workers).

Recent surveys of the victims (1998 and 2001) show that many are still suffering, particularly from post-traumatic stress disorder. In one survey, 20% of 837 respondents complained that they feel insecure whenever riding a train, while 10 percent answered that they try to avoid any gas-attack related news. Over 60 percent reported chronic eyestrain and said their vision has worsened.

About 200 people were arrested. About 20 are either still in Japan's lengthy trial process standing trial or have already been convicted. At least eight Aum members, including the founder, have received death sentences for their roles in the attack.

http://www.japan-101.com/culture/sarin_gas_attack_on_the_tokyo_su.htm

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/03/dayintech_0320

http://bozosapiens.blogspot.com/2010/03/tokyo-subway-terror-attack-consensus.html

Additional Reading 4 “Chechen rebel leader asserts role in Moscow subway bombings”

4. Comment on the following: Many Muslims and human rights activists have criticized the government's counter-terrorism operations, saying they unfairly target Muslims.

5. Work in pairs. Student A is to read article 1, Student B is to read article 2. When both finish reading, exchange the information about the obstacles Muslims might face when travelling. Do you think it is fair? Why? Why not? Ask questions for details if necessary.

Article 1. U.S. changing the way air travelers are screened

By Anne E. Kornblut and Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writers Friday, April 2, 2010; 10:25 PM

The Obama administration is abandoning its policy of using nationality alone to determine which U.S.-bound international air travelers should be subject to additional screening and will instead select passengers based on possible matches to intelligence information, including physical descriptions or a particular travel pattern, senior officials said Thursday.

After the attempted bombing of an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, U.S. officials hastily decided that passengers from or traveling through 14 specified countries would be subjected to secondary searches. Critics have since called the measures discriminatory and overly burdensome, and the administration has faced pressure to refine its approach.

Under the new system, screeners will stop passengers for additional security if they match certain pieces of known intelligence. The system will be "much more intel-based," a senior administration official said, "as opposed to blunt force."

"It's much more tailored to what the intelligence is telling us, what the threat is telling us, as opposed to stopping all individuals of a particular nationality or all individuals using a particular passport," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

On Christmas Day, Nigerian student Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly tried to ignite explosives sewn into his underwear as Northwest Airlines Flight 253 prepared to land, but the device failed and he was subdued by fellow passengers. Abdulmutallab has allegedly said he was trained by an al-Qeada affiliate in Yemen.The case exposed gaps in the government's ability to identify people who might pose a threat.

Days later, the administration ordered a significant increase in secondary searches, requiring all passengers from or traveling through Afghanistan, Algeria, Lebanon, Libya, Iraq, Nigeria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia and Yemen to undergo extra security at the airport.

Travelers from countries considered state sponsors of terrorism -- Cuba, Syria, Iran and Sudan -- were subjected to the same screening, including pat-downs and additional bag checks.

Airlines had warned that the measures instituted after the Christmas Day incident would need to be eased before the busy summer travel season. And critics objected that the added scrutiny amounted to a pretext for racial profiling that could potentially affect 675 million people, including American Muslims and religious pilgrims.

The underlying airline security policy of checking passenger names against watch lists will continue, and certain passengers will still be banned from flying or required to submit to additional security based on names in intelligence databases. About 24,000 people around the world are currently on those "no-fly" and "selectee" lists.

Administration officials said the new system will "significantly" reduce the number of passengers chosen for mandatory extra screening, eliminating entire swaths of travelers who had been chosen based on their nationalities.

The official offered a hypothetical case to illustrate how the new system will work. If U.S. intelligence authorities learned about a terrorism suspect from Asia who had recently traveled to the Middle East, and they knew the suspect's approximate age but not name or passport number, those fragments would be entered into a database and shared with commercial airline screeners abroad.

The screeners would be instructed to look for people with those traits and to pull them aside for extra searches, the official said, acknowledging that that in some cases, screeners will have to rely on their judgment as they consider the listed traits.

While intelligence officials had fragments of information about Abdulmutallab -- including warnings from his father that he was becoming radicalized, and warnings about a Nigerian plot against U.S. interests -- those pieces of information were not connected in time to keep him from flying.

Administration officials have said that, in hindsight, the central failure involved inadequate sharing of information. It is not clear whether the new screening measures would have been sufficient to block him.

Article 2. Travelers with Muslim names find themselves fighting for U.S. visas

By Edward Cody

washington post foreign service Thursday, April 1, 2010

LYON, FRANCE -- The clean-cut young Frenchman seemed to have everything going for him. A graduate of an elite French engineering school, he had interned at the upper-crust Rothschild bank in Paris, handled wealth management for a while on Wall Street and was accepted for a prestigious master's degree program at the University of California at Berkeley.

Except for one thing: His name was Mohamed Youcef Mami.

The State Department held up his student visa for more than two months for "administrative processing," which according to diplomats is the euphemism-of-art for a check against multiple watch lists maintained by intelligence agencies in Washington designed to prevent suspected terrorists from entering the United States.

Since President Obama scolded the agencies for overlooking warning flags against Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian charged with trying to blow up an Amsterdam-to-Detroit flight on Christmas Day, the checks have been reinforced and the lists have grown. With that comes a higher likelihood of "administrative processing" for visa applicants whose names may resemble those of terrorist suspects but who are "guilty" of nothing more than having Muslim parents.

While the computers whirred and security bureaucrats scrutinized their lists, Mami's nonrefundable flight from Lyon to San Francisco departed March 18 without him, and nobody would tell him why. As a result of the delay, he missed orientation and the first week of his financial engineering courses at Berkeley. After dozens of increasingly desperate telephone calls, e-mails and letters, Mami, 27, had concluded that he was being discriminated against because of his name and that Obama's speech in Cairo calling for friendship with the Muslim world was hollow PR.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject's sensitivity, said he could not comment on individual cases but added that sometimes a name goes into the security check system and gets a hit because, as is frequently the case with Muslims, it is a common name. "This does not necessarily mean that this is the person who is really in the database," he said.

For Mami, the waiting began Jan. 28, when he went to Paris for a standard visa interview by a consular officer. After routine questions, the officer told him he would have to wait two or three weeks for "administrative processing," Mami recalled. When he asked what that meant, he said, the officer told him he was not authorized to discuss it.

Mami said at first he reasoned that the delay would not be a problem because orientation classes at Berkeley were to begin March 22. But when the visa had still not arrived by Feb. 15, he sent a registered letter to the embassy inquiring about the delay. The next day, a woman called and said such delays were common and could last weeks or even months, he said.

That was the beginning of more than a month of telephone calls, e-mails and letters. The graduate school at Berkeley wrote a letter to the consulate urging that the visa be granted, but still no word came. Increasingly desperate, Mami struck out in every direction. Last Thursday, he wrote letters to Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), French Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner, Lyon Mayor Gérard Collomb and Clinton's representatives for scientific exchanges with the Muslim world.

To all, he described his situation and begged for their intervention, but he got no immediate reply. Feinstein's office in San Francisco, which Mami also contacted by phone and e-mail, promised to make inquiries and let him know the outcome. But Mami did not hear back. The next day he e-mailed The Post bureau in Paris.

The waiting ended Wednesday, and Mami's world was suddenly not the same. Two days after The Washington Post inquired about Mami's case, the U.S. Embassy in Paris called and told him the visa was on the way. His ordeal over, Mami pounced on the Internet to look for a cheap flight to San Francisco, vowing to be in class in Berkeley by Monday morning.

"It is a happy ending, just like in Hollywood," he said after hearing the news. "I'm not going to bear a grudge. I'm sure I'll have so much to do to get my master's at Berkeley that I'll soon forget this visa problem."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/03/31/AR2010033103613.html?wpisrc=nl_headline

6. Vocabulary. Make a list of useful expressions using the texts of the articles 1 and 2. Compare it with the partner’s list. Use the expressions in the sentences of your own.

7. Speaking. Remember the hostage affairs in Beslan (the school seizure) or Moscow theatre in Dubrovka street. Discuss them assuming any roles you like. Use the articles from Additional Reading Section if necessary.