Free Republic

The Obama administration may be pushing to close the Guantanamo Bay prison, but that doesn't mean all the prisoners want to go home. Two Algerian prisoners being held at the Cuban naval base are fighting against being transferred out because they fear Islamist extremists will try to kill them when they discover the repatriated men don't share their views on violence, a lawyer for one of them told The Wall Street Journal. Robert Kirsch, who represents detainee Belkacem Bensayah, said sending him and the other Algerian detainee, Djamel Ameziane, back to the North African country is "the most callous, political...

UNITED NATIONS – China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam are among the nations running unopposed for seats on the Human Rights Council, the U.N.'s highest rights watchdog body, a prospect that has upset independent human rights groups. The General Assembly on Tuesday will elect 14 new members to the 47-seat, Geneva-based council, which can shine a spotlight of publicity and censure on rights abuses by adopting resolutions — when it chooses to do so. It also has dozens of special monitors watching problem countries and major issues ranging from executions to drone strikes. New York-based Human Rights Watch pointed out...

DEFYING EVIL: ALBERT CAMUS AND HIS CENTURY Posted By Vladimir Tismaneanu On November 7, 2013 @ 12:29 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage Tyrants conduct monologues above a million solitudes –Albert Camus, The Rebel I disagree with Bernard-Henri Lévy: the 20th century did not belong to Sartre. From the point of view of the Evil perpetrated, it was Lenin’s century. But if one takes honesty, truth, or Good as criteria, then it was Camus’s age. When we are assaulted by so much unsettling news, when we despair as we witness the rise of moral misery, when nihilism resurrects in front of our...

Albert Camus, who would be 100 years old Thursday, is ageless. The French Algerian's life and work reflect the long tragedy of the 20th century, marked by disquiet, genocide and violence, but his diagnosis of our absurd condition, and his effort to find not a cure (there is none) but the proper response, tie him just as firmly to the new millennium. Camus lived on intimate terms with the absurd. He lost his father, whom he never knew, in the war to end all wars that emphatically failed in that regard. He was a French intellectual from working-class Algiers, a...

(Reuters) - Algerian troops discovered a huge arms cache near the border with Libya, including hundreds of surface-to-air missiles, rockets and landmines, an Algerian security source said on Thursday. ... The source said the cache was found in Illizi in southern Algeria, about 200 km (125 miles) from the Amenas gas plant, which Libyan-based Islamist militants attacked in January, killing nearly 40 foreign contractors. The weapons included 100 anti-aircraft missiles, more than 500 MANPAD shoulder-launched rockets often used against low flying aircraft like helicopters, and hundreds of rocket launchers, rifles, landmines and rocket-propelled grenades, the source added.

Libya is facing its most critical moment since the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi with armed groups blockading oil fields and terminals, choking output to a 10th of normal levels and threatening economic disaster. With the government forced to import fuel to keep power stations running and queues growing at petrol stations, the prime minister, Ali Zaidan, has repeatedly threatened to send troops to retake striking ports. But the leader of rebels blockading ports in Cyrenaica, home to the bulk of Libya's oil, said such a move would be tantamount to a "declaration of war". Ibrahim Ali Jathran, commander of troops...

Two Algerian prisoners at the US military detention facility at Guantanamo Bay have been transferred back to their homeland. Nabil Said Hadjarab and Mutia Sadiq Ahmad Sayyab were handed to the government of Algeria under a deal announced last month as part of efforts to eventually close the "war on terror" military prison.

SNIP Sissi: The dilemma between the former president and the people originated from [the Muslim Brotherhood’s] concept of the state, the ideology that they adopted for building a country which is based on restoring the Islamic religious empire. That’s what made [former president Mohamed Morsi] not a president for all Egyptians, but a president representing his followers and supporters. Weymouth: When did that become obvious to you? It was obvious on the first day – the day of his inauguration. He started with offending the judiciary and not giving them the appropriate treatment. The Brotherhood experience in ruling a country...

U.S. embassies in a slew of Muslim countries will close on Sunday due to a credible and serious security threat. The embassies will close in response to "a specific threat against a U.S. embassy or consulate," according to a senior U.S. official, who called it a "concerted effort" to target an embassy or consulate in a Muslim country. "We just don't know which one," the official told ABC News. "There could be other targets, not just embassies," another U.S. official said. The threat is considered to be throughout the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia. Some of the biggest...

When rebel forces, led by Arab-speaking Muslims, seized control of the Central African Republic this March, it deepened fears that a co-ordinated Islamist insurgency could now be spreading through swathes of the continent. Four months on, the landlocked country is living through a reign of terror, largely directed against its Christian minority.“Churches have been routinely robbed and pillaged here, while Muslim mosques have been left untouched,” Mgr Cyriaque Gbate Doumalo, secretary-general of the Central African Republic’s Catholic bishops’ conference, told me in an interview. “Our public institutions aren’t functioning and our hospitals have been ransacked, leaving the sick and destitute...

A complete mandible of Homo erectus was discovered at the Thomas I quarry in Casablanca by a French-Moroccan team co-led by Jean-Paul Raynal... This mandible is the oldest human fossil uncovered from scientific excavations in Morocco. The discovery will help better define northern Africa's possible role in first populating southern Europe. A Homo erectus half-jaw had already been found at the Thomas I quarry in 1969, but it was a chance discovery and therefore with no archeological context... The morphology of these remains is different from the three mandibles found at the Tighenif site in Algeria that were used, in...

London - The claim was made by the Israeli liberal newspaper “Haaretz” citing a report of the British Government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills which oversees security exports. Israel is reported to have exported to Pakistan a range of military equipment purchased from Britain, but Islamabad denied the claim with a spokesman for the Directorate of Inter-Services Public Relations describing it as “baseless”. “The report is misleading and not based on facts,” he said. The claim was made by the Israeli liberal newspaper Haaretz citing a report of the British Government’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) which...

LONDON (MarketWatch) — Rising American output of shale oil is rewriting global trade patterns and deepening fault lines within the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, limiting its ability to mount a collective response. A crucial OPEC meeting in Vienna on Friday will mark the first stage of a debate on shale’s oil’s impact. The meeting is unlikely to lead to a change in production levels, several OPEC delegates said — but inaction would set the stage for a future showdown. “We are heading toward some problems,” a delegate from a Persian Gulf OPEC member said. Oil output from...

Algerian Military Testing An A330 MRTT at Boufarik (Source: Le Matin DZ; published May 13, 2013) (Published in French; unofficial translation by defense-aerospace.com) Just weeks after the C17 evaluation that took place in Boufarik and the air force test center at Tamanrasset, an Airbus A330 MRTT tanker landed last week at the main air transport base in Boufarik. According to the “secret difa3” blog, the Algerian Air Force is in the process of finalizing a contract to acquire three A330 aircraft to reinforce its tanker and long-range transport fleet. Besides their ability to refuel in-flight fighter and attack aircraft, the...

Egypt’s Interior Ministry said on Saturday that it had detained men belonging to an al Qaeda-linked group who were planning a bomb attack on a foreign embassy in the country. Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim said Saturday that Egyptian security forces had intercepted a terrorist cell linked to al Qaeda that was on the verge of carrying out a suicide attack on a foreign embassy. “The Interior Ministry was able to direct a successful blow to a terrorist cell that was planning suicide operations,” Ibrahim said during a televised news conference. The minister did not specify which embassy was being targeted,...

TEL AVIV – There is a common threat that links the Sept. 11, 2012, Benghazi attack to both the Boston Marathon bombings and the terror assault on the In Amenas gas facility in southern Algeria in January. The thread runs through al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP, one of the most deadly members of the al-Qaida conglomerate. AQAP previously attempted several major attacks within the U.S. The group was the first al-Qaida member to comment on the Benghazi attack, releasing a statement arguing the assaults on the U.S. mission and nearby CIA annex were revenge for the death of...

Canadian authorities announced Monday they have broken up an Al Qaeda-linked terror plot to attack a passenger train as it crossed over a bridge in the Toronto area. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police said Monday that two suspects have been arrested on terrorism charges. Chiheb Esseghaier and Raed Jaser, who live in greater Montreal and Toronto -- were conspiring to carry out an Al Qaeda-supported attack against Via Rail, but posed no immediate threat to the public. "It was definitely in the planning stage but not imminent," RCMP chief superintendent Jennifer Strachan told reporters at a news conference. Read more:...

Venezuela Receives 13 Russian Armored Vehicles MOSCOW, March 28 (RIA Novosti) – Armed forces in Venezuela have received a new batch of Russian amphibious combat vehicles, the Moscow-based Center for Analysis of Global Arms Trade said on Thursday. Thirteen BMP-3 infantry fighting vehicles were delivered by sea to the port of Puerto Cabello, the center said. This marks the first report of an arms delivery by sea to Venezuela since the death of President Hugo Chavez in March. Venezuela ordered a total of 123 BMP-3 vehicles in 2009, with the first delivery made in 2011, the center said. It is...

Chad's military on Saturday said that its soldiers in Mali killed the al Qaeda commander who was behind the mass hostage crisis which occurred just a few months ago at an Algerian gas plant and which left dozens dead. "On Saturday, March 2, at noon, Chadian armed forces operating in northern Mali completely destroyed a terrorist base (...) The toll included several dead terrorists, including their leader Mokhtar Belmokhtar," Chadian armed forces spokesman General Zacharia Gobongue said...

Chad’s military said Mokhtar Belmokhtar, one of the world's most wanted men, died on Saturday in an assault on an Islamist rebel base in northern Mali. Belmokhtar was at the centre of an international manhunt after at least 37 foreign hostages, including six Britons, were killed after militants seized the gas complex in eastern Algeria.