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At least four people have been killed in two separate explosions at luxury hotels in the Indonesian capital Jakarta, say reports. The country's Metro TV reported that one blast hit the Ritz-Carlton and the other, the Marriott Hotel. Television footage showed the facade of one of the hotels had been torn off by the blast. The BBC's Karishma Vaswani, outside the Marriott, said ambulances are present and security is extremely tight. South Jakarta police Col Firman Bundi said the four who died were foreigners, reported AP. "There were explosions heard from two separate places, one the JW Marriott, the other...

Note: Photo included. SNIPPET: "Pakistani security forces have detained a senior terrorist leader behind suicide attacks in the capital who has links to the leader of the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque. A terrorist commander known as Fidaullah was arrested on May 27 along with Shah Abdul Aziz, a former member of parliament. The arrests took place outside the home of Maulana Abdullah Aziz, the former leader of the Red Mosque who was released from prison in mid-April on $2,500 bail." SNIPPET: "Fidaullah was a recruiter and handler of suicide bombers; he reportedly recruited from religious schools in Islamabad and...

Note: Photo included. Note: The following blog entry is a quote: Blog Details Beirut: Jamaat-e-Islami Leader Meets With Hamas Official Abdul Ghaffar Aziz, director of foreign affairs of Pakistan’s Jamaat-e-Islami, meets with Hamas’s Deputy President Musa Abu Marzuq in Beirut. Source: www.jasarat.com, Pakistan, accessed April 15, 2009 Posted at: 2009-04-15

“Around 600 students of Jamia Hafsa and Jamia Fareedia have not returned to their homes after the Lal Masjid operation. These are the people called ‘missing students’ and they are hiding in madrassas and mosques in and around the two cities Islamabad and Rawalpindi. They are walking bombs and are determined to blow themselves up any time, anywhere,” said a source directly involved in the ongoing investigation of suicide blasts in the country.Lal Masjid prayer leader Maulana Abdul Aziz said that five to six hundred students of the two madrassas had been trained, equipped and brainwashed to carry out suicide...

ISLAMABAD—Pakistan's Supreme Court ordered the release on bail Monday of a hard-line cleric who had been detained since shortly before soldiers stormed his mosque in 2007, killing scores of people and energizing the country's Islamist insurgency. Maulana Abdul Aziz was granted bail while the court considers the charges against him in relation to the siege of the Red Mosque in the capital, Islamabad, his lawyer Shaukat Siddiqui told reporters outside the court. Prosecutors were not available for comment. Aziz was arrested as he tried to sneak out of the mosque dressed in an all-covering burqa worn by some Muslim women....

BAGHDAD — Tariq Aziz, the senior aide to Saddam Hussein who gained international renown as the public face of Iraq during the Persian Gulf war in 1991, was sentenced to 15 years in prison on Wednesday for crimes against humanity. It is the second verdict to be issued in a case involving Mr. Aziz, 73. Earlier this month he was acquitted on charges of ordering a brutal crackdown against Shiite protesters after the assassination of a revered cleric. He still faces charges in a third trial involving a massacre of Kurds in 1983. Two of Mr. Hussein’s half brothers, Watban...

Tariq Aziz guilty of Iraq murders Aziz surrendered to US troops in 2003 Tariq Aziz, for many years the public face of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi regime, has been jailed for 15 years for his role in the execution of 42 merchants. Aziz had denied any role in the summary trials of the men accused in 1992 of profiteering during economic sanctions. Two of Saddam Hussein's half-brothers were also found guilty and sentenced to death by a court in Baghdad. Another top official, Ali Hassan al-Majid - commonly known as Chemical Ali - was jailed for 15 years. Two other Iraqi...

Iraq's former deputy Prime Minister Tareq Aziz and Saddam Hussein's hatchetman "Chemical Ali" Hassan al-Majid have been sentenced to 15 years in jail for crimes against humanity. Aziz and Majid, and six other defendants who were charged over the 1992 murders of 42 Baghdad traders, could have been sentenced to death.

Iraq's special criminal court Monday acquitted Tariq Aziz, the man who once served as the urbane, cigar-smoking public face of Saddam Hussein's rule, delivering the most significant not-guilty verdict in a series of prosecutions for crimes against humanity that occurred before the U.S. invasion in 2003. Aziz, who will turn 73 next month, remained in custody, facing charges in two other cases. Only hours after his acquittal, he appeared before another judge to defend himself against charges that he was involved in a massacre of Kurds in 1983. Even so, the verdict - the first in a case against him...

Officials ordered nine Muslim passengers, including three young children, off an AirTran flight headed to Orlando from Reagan National Airport yesterday afternoon after two other passengers overheard what they thought was a suspicious remark. Members of the party, all but one of them U.S.-born citizens who were headed to a religious retreat in Florida, were subsequently cleared for travel by FBI agents who characterized the incident as a misunderstanding, an airport official said. But the passengers said AirTran refused to rebook them, and they had to pay for seats on another carrier secured with help from the FBI. Kashif Irfan,...

Saddam Hussein's ally Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri 'captured' in Iraq By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 12:57am BST 24/04/2008 American forces have captured Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party heir, Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, the most wanted former regime official still at large, it has been reported. A Middle Eastern television channel said Douri, a key force in the country's devastating insurgency, had been seized in a mountain raid in Saddam's home province of Salahaddin. Most wanted: Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri Douri was King of Clubs in the deck of cards of most wanted Iraqis issued to American soldiers after the war. But...

The police chief in the northwestern Wisconsin community of Frederic says he's arrested a man wanted on felony charges that include funding terrorism. Chief R.J. Severude says one of his officers stopped a van this morning about 11:30 a.m., and when the man's Minnesota driver's license was checked there were felony warrants for him. According to the chief, the man has fugitive warrants for money laundering, drug trafficking and financing terrorist attacks inside and outside the U.S. Frederic is a Polk County village of about 1,250 people.

dubai • Iraqi former deputy prime minister Tareq Aziz wants to live in Rome after his release from jail, believing he will be welcomed in the Italian capital, an Arab newspaper reported yesterday. Aziz’s plans were revealed by his lawyer in Baghdad last week, the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq Al Awsat said. “I want to live in Rome. The Pope and Italian officials welcomed me,� Aziz said in answer to a question about his future hopes delivered via his lawyer. Aziz was the only Christian member of Saddam Hussein’s cabinet and frequently met Pope John Paul II and his close advisers,...

Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi deputy prime minister, has told a court that Iran, not Iraq, was to blame for a 1988 gas attack that killed thousands of Kurds. Aziz, whose lawyers said is in poor health as he waits in a US military jail in Baghdad for his own trial, testified as a defence witness in the Anfal case. Saddam's cousin, Ali Hassan al-Majeed, known as "Chemical Ali", and five other former senior Baath party officials are on trial for their roles in a 1988 military campaign which prosecutors say killed up to 180,000 people, many of them gassed....

new insight into how San Francisco police handled the investigation into a New Year's attack on a Yale University choir. Many are saying it was mishandled. Now the story is getting coverage around the country and the world. We're doing a running tally -- it's been 10 days and 17 hours since police responded to the attack on the Yale students, and they still haven't interviewed the victims. This case is getting city officials the kind of attention they do not want, around the world. Since the I-Team broke the story of the New Year's attack on the Yale singing...

- KGO - Members of a renowned choral group from Yale University were attacked outside a New Year's Eve party in San Francisco, sending several of them to the hospital. Now the police department is coming under fire for its handling of the case. This does not look good for the city. Yale sends its popular singing group, The Baker's Dozen, on a holiday concert tour. And San Francisco sends the young men away bloody, bruised, and several of them seriously injured. Laura Aziz sent her son, Sharyar, off on a concert tour with one of Yale University's singing groups...

The Council on American-Islamic Relations is demanding Congress investigate US Airway's removal last week of six imams from one of its flights. The Muslim-rights group claims the imams, who were behaving suspiciously, posed no threat. It's "very, very inappropriate to treat religious leaders that way," a spokesman fumed. According to CAIR, imams are as harmless as Buddhist monks and deserve no less respect. Tell that to flight attendant Kimberly Banducci. According to police reports I've obtained, the Delta Air Lines veteran was assaulted by a Muslim cleric in a bizarre attack aboard a flight from Miami International Airport three years...

Saudi Arabia has given Britain 10 days to halt a fraud investigation into the country's arms trade - or lose a £10 billion Eurofighter contract. The contract supports up to 50,000 British jobs and there are now fears that the deal may go to France. The Saudi government is on the verge of cancelling the contract - an extension of one brokered by Margaret Thatcher 20 year ago - because of a Serious Fraud Office investigation into allegations of a slush fund for members of the Saudi royal family, according to authoritative sources. Tony Blair has been told that the...

A man has been arrested at Gatwick Airport under anti-terrorist laws. It follows the arrest of two men near Heathrow. Gatwick's North Terminal has been closed and its flights suspended. No further details have been released by Sussex Police. Stansted Airport has announced its security is being stepped up.

the Phase II report says: “The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), which is leading the exploitation effort of documents (DocEx) uncovered in Iraq, told Committee staff that 120 million plus pages of documents that were recovered in Iraq have received an initial review for intelligence information. As of January 2006, 34 million pages have been translated and summarized to some extent and are available to analysts in an Intelligence Community database.” pg 62/400 And while that might mislead people into thinking that the assessments made are full and complete, it isn’t until later in the report that a little caveat is...

Many of the quasi-conclusions are based largely on claims of innocence from Saddam Hussein, “a top official in Saddam’s government, Abid Hamid Mahmoud al-Kattab al-Tikriti,” Tariq Aziz and Faruq Hijazi. These are 4/7 of the primary players in any involvement or potential involvement between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda. The other 3 primary players are Mohammed al-Douri (He is Saddam’s VP/muscle man/Thug-In-Charge who remains at large. He is also suspected of being the primary source for most of a large portion of the insurgency and most reports place him as directing operations from inside Syria). The last 2 primary players...

As soldiers and Marines by the hundreds of thousands return home from Iraq they are telling their stories. They are telling family and friends of what they saw and of who they fought. They are writing books that tell of their experiences. Amazon.com is full of them. They have fought and lived through a dramatic and on-going historical event. To them it is real-not politics and so they tell the truth. They describe an invasion and an occupation where Islamic extremists and Iraqi thugs are the enemy. They tell tales of a fight against terrorists; people who rammed cars filled...

How many times have we heard members of the media say, “We know now that there were no ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda”? Typically, people make this claim based on any combination of four sources: President Bush’s 9/17/03 statement, Sec. Powell’s 1/8/04 statement, the 9/11 Commission’s Final Report of 7/22/04 or the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence’s (SSCI) report on Pre-war Iraq intelligence reports: 7/7/04. Yet, in each of these cases, the very quotations that opponents of the war in Iraq point towards as definitive claims of “no ties” are only half quotes. When they refer to President Bush’s...

Saudi Wealth Fuels Global Jihadism Posted Oct. 27, 2003 By Kenneth R. Timmerman Generations of Muslims in the Middle East have been raised on the anti-Western, anti-Semitic theologies of Ayatollah Khomeini and in the Saudi Wahhabi system of madrassas (religious schools). This foundation set the stage for the rise of Osama bin Laden. Doaa 'Amer is a professional TV anchor who hosts Muslim Woman Magazine on IQRAA TV, a satellite channel broadcasting throughout the Arab world. As she tells it, her job is to educate the next generation of children to be "true Muslims." Readers accustomed to hearing Islam described...

(08-29) 15:20 PDT SAN FRANCISCO -- As many as 14 people were injured this afternoon by a motorist who drove around San Francisco running them down before he was arrested, authorities said. Seven of those injured were in critical condition, police and firefighters said. Authorities have identified the man who was arrested as Ohmeed Aziz Popal, who has an address in Ceres. Authorities said they believe Popal was the same driver who ran over a 55-year-old man walking in a bicycle lane in Fremont, at Fremont Boulevard near Ferry Lane, just after noon. That victim died. Popal was arrested at...

SCATTERED AMONG the loose papers and bound files unearthed last week at the Iraqi Foreign Ministry in Baghdad was "letter no. 140/4/5," labeled "Confidential and Personal" and addressed to "The President's Office--Secretariat." The letter concerns George Galloway, a pro-Saddam member of the British Parliament, who founded a charity known as the Mariam Appeal, ostensibly to aid Iraqi children suffering under U.N. sanctions. The missive, from the Iraqi Intelligence Service, is a request that money be funneled directly to Galloway. It reads in part: His projects and future plans for the benefit of [Iraq] need financial support to become a motive...

In the hunt for Saddam Hussein's billions, investigators have identified five networks of more than 100 companies used to launder money skimmed from Iraqi oil sales. Saddam's gangster regime set up shell companies in Switzerland, Jordan, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg and Panama, according to investigators. Those company networks and their banking affiliations were used to enrich the former Iraqi strongman, his sons Uday and Qusay, and other family members. "Ultimately, the money was stolen from the Iraqi people," said Taylor Griffin, spokesman for the Treasury Department, which is heading the government's laundering probe along with U.S. Customs, the Secret Service and various...

Saddam Henchman Tariq Aziz Crying the Blues to U.S. Supreme Court By Jim Kouri, CPP, 7/25/2006 8:13:30 PM Former Iraqi foreign minister Tariq Aziz has retained a U.S. attorney, Giovanni Di Stefano, who has made an application to the United States Supreme Court and stated that he "places the US on notice of a Habeas Corpus Application to the United States Supreme Court." A Writ of Habeas Corpus is a judicial mandate to a prison official ordering that an inmate be brought to the court so that the petitioner's case may be heard. Di Stefano said the question presented to...

Guantanamo Inmates Despair of Ever Leaving Sunday, March 5, 2006 9:13 PM EST The Associated Press By MIRANDA LEITSINGER GUANTANAMO BAY NAVAL BASE, Cuba (AP) — Ahamed Abdul Aziz has been in the Guantanamo Bay prison for more than three years and, by his account, has been interrogated 50 times without being charged with any crime. He waits with anguish for freedom but fears it will never come. "We are in a grave here," he told his lawyers, echoing the despair felt by many of the roughly 490 prisoners held as suspected terrorists at the U.S. naval base in eastern...

Posterboard is up on screen showing translations of what Saddam and Tariq Aziz said on the tapes released this weekend at the Intelligence Summit. It sounds like former UN inspector Tierney is the one reading the translations.

Today, President Bush welcomed Pakistan Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz to the Oval Office where the two discussed the relationship between the two countries, and made a joint statement to the press. Later in the day, President Bush welcomed 2005 NASCAR Nextel Cup champion Tony Stewart to the South Lawn of the White House where they posed for a photo op with the Nextel Cup Champion team (and the winning Chevrolet !) He also met with West Virginia Governor Joe Manchin in the Oval Office, whose legislative proposals to improve mine safety have passed by the West Virginia Senate unanimously. Today,...

Nigergate: The shadow of the French inspector After yesterday’s posting, a close look at Ambassador Wilson, today’s the turn of Mr Jacques Baute. The following article raises some incredible questions and reveals some amazing facts. Mr Baute, a Frenchman, seemed to know all about the the Niger forgeries and kept very quiet about them. The result: the Bush administration was ridiculed. The day after Baute’s organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared the documents to be forgeries the French Government made a startling announcement..... The Bush administration was decieved by it’s presumed allies and the blame was placed on the...

By JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. They also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the...

Tariq Aziz, once Saddam Hussein's most trusted lieutenant, has agreed to testify against the ousted dictator during his forthcoming trial for war crimes, according to his lawyer and American officials. In return for his co-operation, Aziz, 69, Iraq's foreign minister during the Gulf war and deputy prime minister throughout Saddam's 24-year rule, will have the most serious charges against him dropped and be allowed to spend his dotage in exile. The outline plea agreement, under which he will plead guilty to minor charges, was reached after more than two years of delicate negotiations during which Aziz also revealed important intelligence...

Wife and daughters of Tariq Aziz in tears as they tell our correspondent of their first prison reunion IT WAS their first meeting in 28 months, and the family of Tariq Aziz, 69, wept as they described their reunion in an American prison outside Baghdad this week with the man who served for more than a decade as the public face of Saddam Hussein’s regime. “He looked like he had turned 80,” his wife, Violette, told The Times. “He was frail and too tired to walk, even inside the small meeting room. He had to lean against his American military...

Aziz blames bloody campaign to suppress the Shias on Saddam By Our Foreign Staff (Filed: 28/06/2005) Tariq Aziz, the former Iraqi politician who was one of Saddam Hussein's closest associates, blames the bloody suppression of a Shia uprising on his former boss in a video released yesterday. The footage, given out by the tribunal prosecuting members of the deposed regime, is likely to demoralise Saddam loyalists involved in the Iraqi insurgency because it contradicts claims by Aziz's lawyer that he would never betray Saddam. 68-year-old Tariq Aziz [right] appears before the special tribunal Under questioning from an investigative judge six...

KUWAIT CITY -- Kuwaiti prosecutors have drawn up a list of charges against ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and hundreds of his officials for alleged war crimes committed during Iraq's occupation of the Gulf nation, the prosecutor general said Wednesday. The list will be delivered to the Iraqi court that will try Saddam and other former regime members and the new charges will be added to the existing allegations, prosecutor general Hamed al-Othman said, according to the state-owned Kuwait News Agency. Saddam, who was captured in December 2003, already faces charges in Iraq that include killing rival politicians during his...

Charles Pasqua, a former French minister of interior, has emerged as one of the highest-ranking targets of the widening investigations into the Iraq oil-for-food scandal. United Nations, US and French investigators are examining Iraqi documents that show officials in Baghdad were instructed to transfer his lucrative oil allocations to an offshore company, to shield him from criticism. Mr Pasqua's alleged role has emerged as inquiries turn to the role of foreign governments in the corruption within the humanitarian aid programme. France and Russia, which opposed the 2003 invasion, have long been accused in the US of being too close to...

Saddam's $2m offer to WMD inspector By Francis Harris in Washington (Filed: 12/03/2005) Saddam Hussein's regime offered a $2 million (£1.4 million) bribe to the United Nations' chief weapons inspector to doctor his reports on the search for weapons of mass destruction

BAGHDAD (AFP) - Tareq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's jailed right-hand men, was interrogated in Baghdad by representatives of a UN panel investigating corruption in Iraq's oil-for-food programme, his lawyer told AFP. Aziz also made a desperate handwritten and verbal appeal through his lawyer to be allowed to see his family. The meeting with the three investigators lasted almost eight hours and took place at a detention facility near Baghdad's international airport in the presence of US military and government personnel and an Iraqi investigating judge, said defense attorney Badie Aref Izzat. "They had no right to question him like...

Fox News is reporting that one American citizen and two Canadian citizens, all three of Pakistani descent and sympathisers to al-Qaeda, have been arrested in/near Kabul. Details sketchy, developing...........

A Jordanian business man, Fawaz Zureikat, whose name was revealed yesterday as an allegedly business intermediary between Labour member of Parliament George Galloway and Saddam Hussain's regime, has been detained in Amman. George Galloway MP, a familiar face to Arab public, is at the top of the news once again, but this time as having been, allegedly, on the pay-roll of Saddam Hussain's regime, at least since 2000. The allegations, claimed to have been uncovered in "secret documents" found by a reporter in two charred boxes at the first floor of the looted foreign ministry in Baghdad are many and...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

The U.S. is engaged in a bloody war in Iraq for the purpose of eliminating the remnants of a terrorist regime, foreign terrorists, and bringing democracy to Iraq and the region. It is a big gamble that has put radical Islam on the defensive around the world. But shocking evidence demonstrates that controversial former U.S. Marine and former U.N. weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who now writes for the anti-American Arab "news" organization Al Jazeera, was involved in a controversial effort to stop the war by enlisting prominent personalities in a "peace" campaign.

BAGHDAD, June 30 (Reuters) - Saddam Hussein, who brutalised Iraqis for decades, said good morning and sought to ask some questions when the United States handed him over to Iraqi justice on Wednesday, a witness said. Saddam, who was captured hiding near his hometown of Tikrit in December, looked in good health as he appeared before an Iraqi judge in the first legal step towards a trial for the cruelties he inflicted during his 35 years of power. "Saddam said good morning and asked if he could ask some questions," Salem Chalabi, a lawyer leading the work of a tribunal...

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

Medic treated imprisoned Iraqi leaders His patients came right from the top - of old regime By SCOTT WILLIAMS swilliams@journalsentinel.com Posted: Nov. 13, 2004 Entering a small prison cell under heavy security, Cook used Arabic to exchange a few introductory words with the patient. "Hello. God be with you," he said, employing a common Muslim greeting. "God be with you," replied Saddam Hussein. It was the first of a handful of face-to-face encounters Cook had with the ousted Iraqi leader while serving on an elite medical team entrusted to care for top officials of Hussein's regime. Cook also worked unsuccessfully...

A letter sent to his family by Iraq's former foreign minister Tareq Aziz reveals that he was indicted on two counts of mass murder by an Iraqi court in late June. The charges, which carry the death penalty, relate to killings in 1979 and 1990. The letter did not reach his family in Jordan until last week. Mr Aziz's son announced today that the letter contains a request that they find him a good lawyer. The former Iraqi minister, one of Saddam Hussein's closest associates, surrendered to the Americans in April last year. Since then he has been held at...

... The Bush Administration makes some breakthrough antiterror arrests and promptly shares some of its new information with the public. For its trouble, it then finds itself subject to handwringing "news analyses" wondering whether the timing was politically motivated and editorials lecturing on the temperature of terror warnings as if we were talking about Goldilocks's porridge. ... Everyone knows enough about al Qaeda's modus operandi by now to understand that the group plans years in advance and doesn't easily give up on targets. They also understand that the same people nitpicking now would be the first to point the finger...

THE dark suit was borrowed straight from the rack of a Baghdad store, the beard almost entirely grey but a little better trimmed than when he last appeared in public, the white shirt neatly pressed but unadorned by a tie. His jailers had even let him leave his handcuffs outside the court. As Saddam Hussein made his first public appearance yesterday since he emerged blinking into the light from the notorious "spider hole" last December, it was clear that some things had changed. He was a good deal thinner, for a start, and this time he’d had time to comb...