Hezbollah Cell Begins Operations in United States
Hezbollah cell leader Mohamad Youssef Hammoud was denied a travel visa by the US embassy in Syria, after which he traveled to Venezuela. After purchasing a forged travel visa, arrived in New York City in 1992. By 1995, Hammoud set up operations in Charlotte, North Carolina, working at a local pizza restaurant. At least two additional members of the Hezbollah Charlotte cell entered the United States with false travel visas from Venezuela purchased for $200, and three had travel visas issued in Cyprus. Half the cell members were born in Lebanon, and the other half were US-born, of Lebanese descent. Early in the spring of 1995, Detective Robert Fromme, working a second job at the tobacco wholesaler JR Discount (in Statesville, North Carolina) observed the cell purchasing massive quantities of cigarettes, paying for them in cash. The cash was usually carried in large grocery bags, containing as much as $20,000 to $30,000 at a time.
Read more about this topic: Operation Smokescreen
Famous quotes containing the words united states, cell, begins, operations, united and/or states:
“As a Tax-Paying Citizen of the United States I am entitled to a voice in Governmental affairs.... Having paid this unlawful Tax under written Protest for forty years, I am entitled to receive from the Treasury of “Uncle Sam” the full amount of both Principal and Interest.”
—Susan Pecker Fowler (1823–1911)
“each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“I would sell my life to avoid
the pain that begins in the crib
with its bars or perhaps
with your first breath
when the planets drill
your future into you....”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It was evident that, both on account of the feudal system and the aristocratic government, a private man was not worth so much in Canada as in the United States; and, if your wealth in any measure consists in manliness, in originality and independence, you had better stay here. How could a peaceable, freethinking man live neighbor to the Forty-ninth Regiment? A New-Englander would naturally be a bad citizen, probably a rebel, there,—certainly if he were already a rebel at home.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“fundamentally an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism.”
—Thomas Nagel (b. 1938)