Free Republic

WASHINGTON -- The health of terrorist cleric Omar Abdel-Rahman, the so-called Blind Sheik, is deteriorating _ renewing fears that his death in prison could trigger an attack on the United States, officials said Thursday. There is no credible indication that an attack on the U.S. is imminent, said several law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the situation. In a two-page bulletin, dated Dec. 8, the FBI reported to federal intelligence officials that Rahman was rushed from prison to a Missouri hospital two days earlier for a blood transfusion. There, doctors discovered...

At a Thanksgiving dinner party one of the guests surprised me with the vehemence of his objection to recent Congressional action which authorized military commissions for the trying of certain Islamic terrorists. It surprised me because he was quite conservative in some of the other views he expressed that day. His complaint was that this authorization endangered his constitutional rights in general and that these powers would be abused. Like so many other people who are not really paying attention, my dinner companion is not aware of several important points:

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

RIVERSIDE'S TERROR RALLY By CHARLES E.F. MILLARD October 18, 2006 -- In the uproar over Monday's outrageously soft sentence for terror-aiding lawyer Lynne Stewart, Riverside Church seems to be distancing itself from the despicable rally it hosted in her support Sunday. Stewart was convicted by a jury of her peers. The uncontested facts were that she had smuggled messages from convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman ("the blind sheik") to his followers in the Islamic world. Those messages directed his followers in the terror group Gama'a Islamiyya to end their cease-fire with the Egyptian government and begin killing Rahman's enemies. Rahman,...

Imam Fawaz Damra helped lay the groundwork for an organization that ultimately merged into al-Qaida in the late 1980s. He was an unindicted co-conspirator of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And he passionately raised money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which killed dozens of Jews in Israel during the 1990s. Yet Damra, spiritual leader to thousands of Muslims in Northeast Ohio, seemed to fly comfortably beneath the radar of U.S. terror investigators - until Tuesday. FBI agents swooped in on the Palestinian cleric at his Strongsville home, arresting him on a relatively minor - and...

Attorney Lynne F. Stewart is a progressive icon. A protege of Ramsey Clark and the late William Kunstler and a member of the National Lawyers Guild and the Center for Constitutional Rights, Stewart embodies the committed professionalism of the radical "legal left." Under this code, attorneys select clients whom they regard as the put-upon victims of an oppressive system or the persecuted champions of a just cause. Stewart represented Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind cleric convicted in 1995 of masterminding the first World Trade Center bombing. She is now on trial as a terrorist herself for aiding and abetting...