Free Republic

In May 1990, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush was convinced that Pakistan was poised to use a covert nuclear weapon capability against India. The impending apocalypse—which would have dwarfed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had to be prevented at all costs. Consequently, the White House dispatched a trusted emissary, Robert Gates (a man who would later become U.S. Defense Secretary in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations) on a top secret mission to South Asia—first to Pakistan and then to India. Eventually on May 21, 1990, it was concluded that the Gates mission had indeed succeeded and, paradoxically, the sense that the...

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

The Kurdish Halabja Centre CHAK has submitted new and possibly incriminating evidence in the appeal case against Dutch businessman Frans van Anraat. The documents were reportedly supplied by the Iraqi tribunal that sentenced former dictator Saddam Hussein to death. In December last year, Frans van Anraat was sentenced to 15 years in jail. The court in The Hague found him guilty of supplying materials for chemical weapons to the Saddam Hussein regime in the 1980s. He was acquitted of complicity in genocide because he reportedly did not know that Saddam Hussein intended to use poison gas on the Iraqi population....