Free Republic

UN inspectors in Iraq spent their working hours drinking vodka while ignoring a shadowy nocturnal fleet believed to be smuggling goods for Saddam Hussein, a former senior inspector told the US Senate yesterday. In a move that provoked fury from officials of the Swiss firm Cotecna, an Australian former inspector detailed a picture of incompetence, indifference and drunkeness among the men acting as the frontline for UN sanctions. Arthur Ventham, a former Australian army officer and customs officer, joined the operation in 2002 and worked at various sites in Iraq and neighbouring states. He said that at Iskendurun in eastern...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

Terrorists from al-Qaeda have been making chemical and biological weapons in Georgia’s Pankisi Gorge, French Interior Minister Dominique de Villepin said on Tuesday. Speaking at a world conference on bio-terrorism in Lyons that was organized by Interpol, he said that “several al-Qaeda cells have been trained in Afghanistan where they have learned to use biological agents including anthrax, ricin and botulism toxins. Later, after the fall of the Taliban regime, those groups continued their experiments in the Pankisi Gorge, on the territory of Georgia, bordering Chechnya,” Interfax news agency reported. The minister added that al-Qaeda terrorists “were able to use...

American universities rank among the best in the world, but they also boast another, more dubious distinction: They are home to some of the world’s most radical academics. Last month, one of these select individuals, UC Berkeley professor Hatem Bazian, brought his hate-filled show to two extremist Islamic Centers in South Florida. Both of these institutions are in the process of building large-scale mosques in their respective cities. And, given that their guest had previously called for attacks on the United States, the question naturally arose: Were these institutions looking to make friends in the community or to start a holy war?Past...

Zaynab Khadr claims she didn’t know that terrorist Osama bin Laden would attend her wedding in Pakistan. Now the 25-year-old says she didn’t know clips of bin Laden’s voice calling for the killing of Americans were on the laptop computer seized by the RCMP at Pearson airport when she returned to Canada last February.