Free Republic

SNIPPET: "BERLIN - Germany’s BND foreign intelligence agency believes Iran is capable of producing and testing an atomic bomb within six months, much sooner than most analysts estimate, according to a report in German weekly Stern. The report, which quotes BND experts, says the agency has information supporting the view that Iran has mastered the enrichment technology necessary to make a bomb and has enough centrifuges to make weaponised uranium. “If they wanted to, they could detonate an atomic bomb in half a year’s time,” the story quoted a BND expert as saying. The BND did not return two calls...

How German Intelligence Helped Justify the US Invasion of Iraq Five years ago, the US government presented what it said was proof that Iraq harbored biological weapons. The information came from a source developed by German intelligence -- and it turned out to be disastrously wrong. But to this day, Germany denies any responsibility......(Der Spiegel)   German Intelligence Was 'Dishonest, Unprofessional and Irresponsible' - Interview with David Kay (Der Spiegel)   'The Germans Share in the Responsibility'- Interview with Lawrence Wilkerson (Der Spiegel)

The Kosovo on the way into independence Constitutional state? Rather not! Jürgen Roth The Kosovo is on the way into independence, which cannot please three leaders of the country. The world week is present a secret paper, which occupies, how the Politgrössen dominates the organized crime. They found support for their mafiösen business also in Switzerland. If the negotiations begin shortly over the international-law status of the Kosovo, the most burning problem will not be topic: the connection between political decision makers and powerful criminal clan in the Serbian province, which is administered since 1999 by the UN. So three...

President Bush, enthusiastically welcomed as the first U.S. president in this former communist nation, served notice Sunday he is running out of patience with Russia's objections to independence for neighboring Kosovo. "Sooner rather than later you've got to say 'Enough's enough - Kosovo is independent,'" Bush said, telling Albanians what they wanted to hear. He said independence was a certainty. Nearing the end of an eight-day trip, Bush got a hero's reception in this desperately poor country, still struggling to recover from being cut off from the rest of the world for four decades under the harsh rule of dictator...

Couple pleaded guilty to conspiracy charges Consultants who took Brownsville Navigation District officials to China and paid U.S. Rep. Solomon P. Ortiz’s travels to the Far East are facing possible prison time after recently pleading guilty to an immigration plot involving Chinese nationals. Sixty-four-year-old Kenneth D. Cohen, a Houston businessman and board member of the Marine Military Academy in Harlingen, and his wife, Ping Lee Cohen, 54, pleaded guilty in February to conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government in federal court in Houston. “Mr. Ortiz was deeply disappointed that Ken and Ping broke the law, and the judge will decide...

Determined to win the Cold War, the CIA kept quiet about the whereabouts of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the 1950s for fear he might expose undercover anticommunist efforts in West Germany, according to documents released Tuesday. The 27,000 pages released by the National Archives are among the largest post-World War II declassifications by the CIA. They offer a window into the shadowy world of U.S. intelligence — and the efforts to use former Nazi war criminals as spies, sometimes to detrimental effect. The war criminals "peddled hearsay and gossip, whether to escape retribution for past crimes, or for...

German spies handed Saddam Hussein's war plans to the Americans while their government was denouncing the planned attack, it was claimed yesterday. The documents were transferred as the coalition completed its invasion plans in February 2003. A month later, American and British forces entered Iraq. The claims, in yesterday's New York Times, were swiftly denied by German officials. The paper said that a classified American military document referred to Saddam and his aides meeting in late 2002 to radically amend Iraq's war plans. They had wanted an invading army slowed and deflected by Iraq's military en route to Baghdad. But...

December 9, 2005 — The Brownsville Navigation District is now saying it lost $9.2 million spent on the failed rail bridge project. The port is now being “brutally honest” to itself, taxpayers, bondholders, creditors and the public, said BND Chairman Peter M. Zavaletta. The board acknowledged the loss Wednesday when it approved the audit of the 2005 fiscal year that accountant Carlos Barrera of Long Chilton LLP presented. “This action rejects the Enron-style of denial and deception and is a continuing attempt on our part to come clean with this entire bridge controversy,” Zavaletta said Thursday. Recognizing the loss, however,...

Villalobos looks into ‘red flags’ on bridge project — A team of county and state investigators will delve into a spending report on the Port of Brownsville’s commercial bridge project that consumed $21.4 million in taxpayers’ money but never materialized. The investigation, conducted by the Cameron County District Attorney’s Office and a Texas Ranger, will look into “red flags” that surfaced when authorities discovered the firm that headed the project set up contracts with stockholders and corporations it does business with. District Attorney Armando Villalobos referred to the act as “self dealing,” and said the case will be brought before...

German MPs examining their army and intelligence service in Kosovo before the ethnic violence in March want to know why they did not follow up a tapped telephone call in which an Albanian extremist urged his allies to prepare a "hot party". Senior German army officers used several internal reports after the violence flared to make assurances that they would have acted differently and been able to provide the necessary protection for Kosovo's Serb minority if they had had the slightest forewarning. But it has emerged that an imminent security threat may have been on their desks. A parliamentary commission...

BERLIN -- Friday – Germany’s intelligence service was aware of Kosovo Albanian plans for the violence which swept Serbia’s southern province in March, according to German media. Television ZDF claims that intelligence agents had the information several weeks before the outbreak which left 19 people dead, a large number injured and hundreds of houses and church buildings destroyed. Three weeks before the violence, intelligence services intercepted a conversation in which an Albanian spoke about preparations for an attack on Serbia, said ZDF, quoting intelligence documents. The same person, according to the report, claimed to be in contact with Al-Qaida and...

BERLIN (Reuters) - The head of Germany's foreign intelligence agency was quoted on Wednesday as saying al Qaeda was regrouping and still posed a threat. August Hanning, head of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND), also told the Muenchner Merkur newspaper he believed that both ousted Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda head Osama bin Laden were still alive. Hanning said German intelligence believed bin Laden was hiding in the border region between Afghanistan (news - web sites) and Pakistan and his al Qaeda network, which Washington blames for the September 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. cities, was preparing for...

GERMANY'S intelligence service believes Iraq has mobile laboratories capable of developing and producing chemical and biologial weapons, according to a German weekly magazine. The laboratories are hidden in trucks that appear completely normal from the outside, Focus magazine says, quoting the results of an investigation by the intelligence service, BND. A BND spokesman was not immediately available for comment on the report. Focus says BND officials gave details about the laboratories to the foreign affairs committee of the Bundestag, the lower house of parliament, in November. The head of the BND, August Hanning, told the deputies the Iraqi government had...