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Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

John Bolton: US should bomb Iranian camps By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 3:35PM BST 06/05/2008 John Bolton, America’s ex-ambassador to the United Nations, has called for US air strikes on Iranian camps where insurgents are trained for war in Iraq. John Bolton was an influential member of President Bush's inner circle Mr Bolton said that striking Iran would represent a major step towards victory in Iraq. While he acknowledged that the risk of a hostile Iranian response harming American’s overseas interests existed, he said the damage inflicted by Tehran would be “far higher” if Washington took no...

Man admits encouraging terror attacksA man today admitted soliciting murder in connection with an alleged plot to organise terrorist training camps across the UK.

Houston-based KBR was awarded an initial $385 million contract in January 2006 for one year, with four one-year options extended into 2007. KBR held a previous emergency detention contract with ICE from 2000 to 2005. ICE spokeswoman Jamie Zuieback told Corsi the primary intent of the contract was to build temporary detention facilities that could be used in the event of a mass migration crisis, but she confirmed the facilities could be employed in national emergencies, including natural disasters.

HOUSTON --A U.S. citizen accused of working alongside al-Qaida members pleaded guilty Thursday to a charge of receiving training from a foreign terrorist organization, authorities said. During a court hearing, Daniel Joseph Maldonado, 28, a Muslim convert who grew up in New Hampshire and was also known as Daniel Aljughaifi and Abu Mohammed, admitted to traveling in December to a terrorist camp in Somalia, where he was trained to use firearms and explosives in an effort to help the Islamic Courts Union topple the government and install an Islamic state. Members of al-Qaida were present at the camp.

Keep in prayer for the Vietnam Human Rights Bill. It is presently in the Senate after passing by a wide margin in the House. If you have any doubt about whether the Bill should pass, take a look at the picture below of an actual re-education camp in Vietnam provided by the Montagnard Foundation. Re-education camps are where believers are typically sent. Stay tuned as we will post a picture per day over the next 4 days. Top    12/26/2004 VietnamPicture 3 of a Vietnamese Re-Education Camp Keep in prayer for the Vietnam Human Rights Bill. It is presently...

UNITED NATIONS -- The North Korean government rounds up disabled people and sends them away from the capital Pyongyang to special camps, where they are sorted by their handicap and subjected to "subhuman conditions," a U.N. report released Thursday said. Author Viti Muntarbhorn, special rapporteur for human rights in North Korea, cited reports from defectors who said the mentally disabled are sent to camps known as "Ward 49." Other camps exist for dwarfs, who may marry but are barred from having children. "To date, the situation facing those with disabilities has presented a very disconcerting picture," Muntarbhorn wrote in the...

The organization building a Muslim youth camp on Coralville Lake is asking Linn and Johnson counties for a small amount of financial support and their endorsements to go after a larger state grant. Bob Ballantyne, a member of the Muslim Youth Camps of America board of directors, asked the Johnson County Board of Supervisors at their informal work session this morning to sign a letter of support for a $250,000 Vision Iowa grant. He also asked the board to consider a "token" contribution to further show the Vision Iowa board that MYCA had the county's support.

My father was a machine gunner with the Army's 28th Infantry Division, which was among the first units to march down the Champs-Elysées after the Allied liberation of Paris . In December 1944, having landed at Normandy and fought across France and Belgium, he was captured in the Battle of the Bulge, and sent hundreds of miles through northern Germany in an unheated boxcar in the dead of winter to a prison camp at Muhlberg in the east. My father survived the war not because of the generosity of the Nazis to Jewish soldiers. The Germans must have been tempted...

Sixty-four years ago today, a quick swipe of a pen by President Franklin D. Roosevelt forever changed the lives of tens of thousands of U.S. citizens. Two months after the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor, Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering all Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast to move inland, fearing an uproar from their assumed loyalty to Japan. (snip) In 1988, President Ronald Reagan issued an apology for the wrongful imprisonment of the 120,000 American citizens. Those incarcerated were issued $20,000, meant to compensate their losses. (snip) For those living, Fuyuume called the payment a small-token...

It is the secret of the world that all things subsist and do not die, but only retire from sight and afterwards return again. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson And so it happens again today, as it has through a lifetime, with the first Major League Baseball players returning to sight after retiring for a winter. All is good with the world again. It begins in Florida and in Arizona, with pitchers and catchers for eight teams reporting this afternoon to their respective Spring Training camps. Leading the way this year are the Tigers, Orioles, Rangers, Angels, Mariners, Cubs, Dodgers and...

Shukhrat Masirokhunov met with Osama bin Laden, was trained by Khattab, recruited mujaheddin and fought Americans in Afghanistan. He also has firsthand knowledge about the situation in Chechnya A Tashkent city court delivered a guilty verdict against members of the Akromiylar movement who took part in the Andizhan events (May, 12-13, 2005). The authorities allege that militants from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) were also involved. Shukhrat Masirokhunov, 34, a former chief of the IMU counterintelligence service who was extradited from Pakistan several months ago, is now awaiting trial in Tashkent. He faces 20 years in prison. It is...

Massive Anti-American Disinformation Campaign Underway It started a few weeks ago : reports of “CIA Torture Planes” that were being used to transport hapless innocents to “secret torture camps” in Eastern Europe. The source was Belliciao – an Italian Communist publication run by a “writers’ collective” that seems to use the name ‘CLAYTON HALLMARK” for stories by a number of people (assuming Google is not totally confused ) : Greg Szymanski,Wayne Beson,Charlene Fassa,etc. The story even has a chart of “known CIA aircraft” , and the names of “CIA shell companies “ that operate them. The New York Times and...

Militants' training camps wiped out By Rahul Bedi in New Delhi (Filed: 10/10/2005) Training camps used by jihadists battling with the Indian army for control of Kashmir were buried by landslides or left in ruins by the earthquake, bringing hope of a new opportunity for peace-making after a 16-year Islamic insurgency. India and Pakistan, nuclear rivals who both lay claim to Kashmir in its entirety, have fought two of their three wars over the territory. Security analysts said yesterday that the earthquake in Pakistan's highly-militarised Kashmir region had "significantly depreciated'' the insurgents' capacity to carry on their fight for independence...

MANILA (AP) - About 500 Muslim rebels have withdrawn from two Mindanao strongholds to let government forces launch an offensive against another Muslim group -- the al-Qaida-linked Abu Sayyaf, a rebel spokesman said Sunday. The Moro Islamic Liberation Front guerrillas, nearly 300 of whom were armed, withdrew from Talayan and Guindolongan Thursday to allow the jungle offensive to go ahead and avoid accidental clashes with government troops, rebel spokesman Eid Kabalu said. The guerrillas plan to return to their camps Monday unless the military asks for an extension, Kabalu said.

By now it hardly needs saying that, contrary to the animadversions of Dick Durbin and Amnesty International, Guantanamo Bay bears no resemblance to Nazi concentration camps, Soviet gulags or Khmer Rouge killing fields. Millions of people were murdered in those places. The sum total of those killed at Gitmo is … zero. But perhaps the critics of U.S. detention practices are correct in saying that this is damning with faint praise. Who wouldn't expect the "land of the free" to behave better than the most monstrous regimes in history? So let's use a better comparison. Look at how the United...

There are 600 prison camps in the United States, all fully operational and ready to receive prisoners. They are all staffed and even surrounded by full-time guards, but they are all empty. These camps are to be operated by FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) should Martial Law need to be implemented in the United States. The Rex 84 Program was established on the reasoning that if a mass exodus of illegal aliens crossed the Mexican/US border, they would be quickly rounded up and detained in detention centers by FEMA. Rex 84 allowed many military bases to be closed down...

Source: NDTV Monday, June 13, 2005 (Islamabad): JKLF leader Yasin Malik has said that he had met Pakistan's Information Minister Sheikh Rashid during the 1980s at militant camps in Peshawar. Yasin Malik is currently on a visit to Pakistan as part of a delegation of Kashmiri separatist leaders. When Rashid met Malik in Pakistan, Malik let it slip that he had already been associated with Rashid.

During a discussion with minority leaders and journalists on Monday, Howard Dean declared that Republicans are “a pretty monolithic party. They all believe the same. They all look the same. It’s pretty much a white Christian party.” He further stated that “the Republicans are not very friendly to different kinds of people” and Democrats are “more welcoming to different folks, because that’s the type of people we are.” Dean continued to defend his remarks as recently as Thursday. Dean’s comments clearly suggest that the GOP is, if not hostile to a demographic broader than white Christians, at least cool toward...

For over 225 years, Americans have valued the rights spoken of in the Declaration of Independence – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Americans have spilt their blood and spent their treasure to protect these basic rights for themselves and others. Amnesty International’s stated purpose is to prevent human rights violations. Thus, one might expect the United States and Amnesty International to be allies. However, they are not because Amnesty International’s stated purpose and its actual purpose are very different. Whatever its claimed purpose, Amnesty International has become just another extreme Left anti-American organization. Amnesty International’s secretary general, Irene...

For those of you who may be queasy about the way the Bush administration is approaching and prosecuting the War on Terror I invite you to consider, for purposes of contrast, the mindset toward foreign policy that springs from the worldview of liberalism. Generally, I refer you to the contrasting reactions of liberals and conservatives to charges against America. Specifically, I refer you to the May 27 column of liberal media icon Thomas L. Friedman, Middle East "expert" and New York Times columnist extraordinaire. If anything, Friedman is often more reasonable than many of his counterparts on the Left. He...

The latest hysteria alleging American human rights abuses of suspected terrorists comes from Amnesty International, which apparently hopes to turn even the slightest supposed mistreatment of prisoners into a full-scale Abu Ghraib-type scandal. According to the Washington Times, Amnesty International "last week called on foreign governments 'to uphold their obligations under international law by investigating U.S. officials implicated in the development or implementation of interrogation techniques that constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment' at the U.S. military base known as Gitmo." Furthermore, in a report titled "The State of the World's Human Rights," the organization charged that "the...

Our area takes great pride in the role many organizations and residents here played in the Underground Railroad during the years leading up to the Civil War. Thousands of slaves were freed because of the courage of individuals who either housed fugitive slaves or went south to escort them to freedom here in the north. It is a heritage we can be proud of. Today, there is a similar effort underway. It is happening in a land divided along lines of north and south. Race is a component. Other nations are involved. And the bravery of conductors and engineers on...

It's a given that The New York Times ignored the Holocaust, a sin of omission confessed by the paper itself. Now we have a book that says it ain't so — that from the beginning to the end of World War II, The Times published 1,186 stories about the extermination of the European Jews. It just buried the stories inside. "Buried by The Times" is the title of the book, and it's more damning by far than anything the critics ever said about the paper's coverage of the worst mass murder in history. This book proves that The Times not...

Sixty years ago, on April 15, 1945, Lieutenant John Randall, then a 24-year-old SAS officer, was on a reconnaissance mission in northern Germany. He and his driver were heading down the road to Lüneberg when he noticed a large, imposing iron gate in front of a track leading off into the woods to their left. Curious, Randall decided to investigate, and so discovered one of the most horrifying aspects of Hitler's Germany. "We were totally unprepared for what we had stumbled across,'' says Randall, now 85, sitting opposite me in the Special Forces Club in London. ''I just drove through...

Israel Says Never Again With New Holocaust Museum By Joel Leyden Israel News AgencyJerusalem----March 13....It is not the Eurovision TV song festival or the Maccabi Tel Aviv basketball team entering the finals of the European championship. There are no ads or promos on Israel television. It is an event which entered my email box as hundreds do from the Israel Government Press Office. But this event was quite different. It talked about a new holocaust museum opening in Jerusalem. At first I questioned if this was a new wing or an extension dedicated by a wealthy contributor in the US...

Anti-Semitism may seem to be a static, unchanging phenomenon but in fact the obsessive hatred of Jews has a history that goes back millennia and continues to evolve.Developments since World War II and the Holocaust have been especially fast-paced and portentous. Here are four of the most significant shifts: From right to left: For centuries, anti-Semitism was the hallmark of the right and merely episodic on the left. To take the ultimate examples of these trends, Stalin's Judeophobia was peripheral to his monstrous project, but Hitler's was central to his. Even a decade ago, this pattern still basically held true....

MOSCOW, February 9 (RIA Novosti) - A former prisoner of the Salaspils death camp and a Latvian citizen, Elvira Ilyakhina, has thanked the Russian president for his position on the Great Patriotic War and on the book "The History of Latvia: 20th century." Janis Urbanovich, the head of the Party of National Consent faction in the Latvian parliament and the president of the Baltic Forum foundation, has delivered her letter to Vladimir Putin. "My letter was prompted by the uneasy atmosphere in my Latvia, set by individual nationalist politicians condemning Russia for various far-fetched misdeeds of the past and the...

Imagine being in the middle of a violent pro-Islam demonstration. That's exactly what happened to a teen named Lee. Indonesian Muslim radicals were stirring up an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish frenzy in front of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. Find out how Lee escaped the violence. A true story by C. Hope Flinchbaugh I was exactly where I didn�t want to be�in the middle of a violent pro-Islam demonstration. It was Oct. 10, 2001, and Indonesian Muslim radicals were stirring up an anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Jewish frenzy in front of the U.S. Embassy in Jakarta. International newspaper and TV journalists were everywhere,...

London 23.01.05 | Yesterday morning I listened to what appears to be a VHF communication, although it has been reported as a telephone conversation, between FARC leaders Juan Santrich and Jorge Tivieras. Radio Caracol of Colombia reports that Tivieras is thought to be the international liaison chief of a guerrilla front with seat in Caracas, Venezuela's capital. Tivieras gives account to Santrich about 41 credentials that he has obtained for an equal number of guerrilla members to assist and participate in the officialy sponsored Bolivarian congress held in Caracas on December 6-9 2004. Furthermore Tivieras states that he is in...

It is one of the enduring controversies of World War II. By the summer of 1944, detailed information about the true nature of the death camps had reached the West, but it was not until months later that Auschwitz was finally liberated by the advancing Red Army. During that time, thousands more had perished in the gas chambers. Whether a precision strike was militarily possible or would have been effective in halting the killings is still hotly contested. But many - including survivors of the camp - say the Allies should have acted whatever the mission's chances of success. The...

Che Guevara is more than just a sleazy tee shirt on an aging leftwinger's food-dribbled chest. Che Guevara is a live emblem of hemispheric terror, kidnapping and murder. And not just in the 1960s but happening right now. Today! The news, still in only Spanish, has just come out this afternoon. Colombia's government just released a tape proving, without a shadow of a doubt, that filthy Marxist narcoterrorist FARC and ELN guerrillas are operating a string of working terrorist camps inside Venezuela. And not just inside Venezuela in the way we thought they were, as Hugo Chavez-hosted recreational guerrilla spas,...

... Zeta's Editor Rafael Poleo says that Chavez’ main problem ... may be that he has so many crises burning simultaneously, that he has no time to worry about ... running the state. Poleo is right and he is wrong. He is right because even if Chavez is really the night owl that he is supposed ... it will be hard for him to juggle all ... he is trying to handle today. He has conflicts about land interventions, company confiscations, the image of hero Danilo Anderson being destroyed, and now the Granda affair. But Poleo is also wrong because...

Should Chávez Be on the List Of Terrorism Sponsors? Recording reveals 100 FARC guerillas in Caracas for Chávez event. DISIP (Intelligence) report reveals Venezuelan frontier overrun by ELN, FARC and ELP guerrillas.

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!

An exhibition in Geneva devoted to Soviet forced labour camps is bringing home the horrors of Stalin’s Gulag. For one Swiss woman who spent five years in a camp in Soviet Kazakhstan, the memories of her imprisonment are still vivid. Else Rutgers, now 92, was one of around 200 Swiss Communists who emigrated to Moscow after the Russian Revolution of 1917 - and one of the few to survive the Gulag. Rutgers was 19 years old when she left Zurich for Moscow with her husband, Wim, a Dutch Communist. It was to be 25 years before she would return home....

WASHINGTON (AFP) - A widely expected rate hike by the Federal Reserve (news - web sites) turned quickly to campaign fodder as President George W. Bush (news - web sites) and presumptive Democratic nominee John Kerry (news - web sites) used the move to highlight their economic views. White House spokesman Scott McClellan, speaking just before the quarter-point boost by the Federal Open Market Committee (news - web sites), said such a move would be a sign of a reinvigorated economy. "It's not unexpected that as the economy continues to grow stronger that interest rates may rise some, and that's...

MOSCOW - Survivors marked the 50th anniversary of a revolt in a Stalin-era prison camp Tuesday, recalling how troops crushed the rebellion with tanks and machine guns . . . and urging society to face up to Soviet atrocities. The Kremlin sent in soldiers to suppress the 40-day rebellion in the Kengir camp in the then-Soviet republic of Kazakhstan in 1954. According to prisoner accounts, up to 600 people were killed and many more injured, although official statistics acknowledged only several dozen victims. "They crushed us with tanks, with guns and machine guns, and because the crowd was thick, a...

Violations alleged in Senate race Mike Madden Argus Leader Washington Bureau published: 05/13/2004 Thune, Daschle camps trade accusations about breaking campaign law WASHINGTON - Forget about lawn signs and television commercials. The latest weapon in the South Dakota Senate race is a law book. With new campaign finance rules in place for the first time in almost three decades, political strategists hope to exploit alleged violations by their rivals to gain an edge in the contest, which may be the tightest Senate race in the nation. Now, aides to Republican candidate John Thune say fliers mailed to advertise this month's...

<p>RIYADH, Saudi Arabia (AP) - Saudi authorities have discovered a number of camps outside Saudi cities used for training al-Qaida militants to carry out terror operations, an Interior Ministry official said Thursday.</p> <p>Two militant figures killed in terror sweeps last year - Turki Nasser al-Dandani and Yosif Salih Fahd Ala'yeeri - commanded the camps, the official told The Associated Press on condition of anonymity. More camp leaders are being sought, the official said.</p>

Australia watches as death looms in Nauru asylum camp By Kathy Marks in Sydney 16 December 2003 Two years after Australia introduced its so-called "Pacific Solution" for asylum-seekers, eight Afghans on the remote island of Nauru were taken to hospital yesterday after refusing food and water for almost a week. The eight are among 284 people, including 93 children, being held in a detention camp on the South Pacific island in conditions condemned as deplorable by refugee advocates. Campaigners claim that several protesters are urinating blood, and fear they may be close to death. Twenty-four men - 23 Afghans and...

RISHKHOR, Afghanistan - From Bali to Istanbul, New York to Casablanca, the ferocious chain of terror that has choked the world since Sept. 11 has stemmed from a single source — camps like this one just south of Kabul, where thousands of young men were indoctrinated in Osama bin Laden (news - web sites)'s brutal vision. An Afghan link can be traced to nearly every major terrorist attack since the 2001 strikes in New York and at the Pentagon (news - web sites), although not all have been carried out directly by bin Laden's al-Qaida, U.S., European and Asian officials...

<p>Leaders of the al Qaeda terrorist network have franchised their organization's brand of synchronized, devastating violence to homegrown terrorist groups across the world, posing a formidable new challenge to counterterrorism forces, according to intelligence analysts and experts in the United States, Europe and the Arab world.</p> <p>The recent attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Chechnya and Iraq show that the smaller organizations, most of whose leaders were trained in al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan, have fanned out, imbued with radical ideology and the means to create or revitalize local terrorist groups. They also are expanding the horizons of groups that had focused on regional issues.</p>

DUESSELDORF, Germany (Reuters) - A Jordanian who said he served as a bodyguard to Osama bin Laden has told a German court how he and others returned from military camps in Afghanistan fuelled by hatred for Israel and the West. Shadi Mohammed Mustafa Abdalla said on Thursday he later rejected violence, bringing him to admit to belonging to al Tawhid, a Palestinian group the United States says has links to al Qaeda, and planning grenade attacks on Jewish targets in Germany. "You lived in the desert," Abdalla told the court in Arabic, speaking of his 18-month stay in Afghanistan. "They...

Families isolated in holiday camps as killer virus spreads By Jeremy Laurance, Health Editor, in Hong Kong 02 April 2003 More than 100 families were moved out of a tower block in Hong Kong yesterday and interned in two government "holiday camps" on the fringes of the city to contain the pneumonia virus that threatens to paralyse the region. Four camps have been prepared with space for more than 1,000 people as the number in hospital with severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars) topped 600. The residents from the 33-storey Block E at Amoy Gardens, which was quarantined on Monday, were...

Seven Western men were among 50 Indonesians who attended training camps organized and financed by al-Qaida in 2001 on the central Indonesian island of Sulawesi, an intelligence official said Friday. Muchyar Yara, a senior intelligence official, said al-Qaida provided an undisclosed amount of money, along with weapons and explosives expertise, for at least 10 camps in the jungles near Poso in Central Sulawesi province. The camps operated between March and November 2001, he said. He said each camp had two or three trainers, one of whom was the son-in-law of the late Indonesian Abdullah Sungkar, the alleged founder of Jamaah...

Here's my situation: Within the next year I will be getting and making a PCS move. I am considering a bunch of different bases at this time, and trying to figure out what my top choices should be. Could some of you vets or military family members please tell what you think about the following locations:1. Colorado Springs, CO2. Fairbanks, AK3. Anchorage, AK4. El Paso, TX5. San Antonio, TX6. Ft. Drum, NY7. Ft. Irwin, CA8. Fayetteville, NC9. Columbia, SC10, Ft. Stewart, GA11. Ft. Hood, TX

How To Silence the War Drums on the Potomac!  by Ron HollandThe Bush Administration plans to topple the government's of Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia (in that order) to establish an American controlled oil cartel of Middle Eastern puppet states. Maybe a win-win opportunity for Bush's "oil buddies" & Israel but it could spark Armageddon in the Middle East, again all for oil!   How to stop the war? The irony is neither public pressure in the US, foreign government mediation or the military of Iraq or Iran can halt the attack, surprisingly, it all depends on Saudi Arabia. To stop...

Government sets up camps for Kashmir refugee crisis By David Bamber, Home Affairs Correspondent (Filed: 09/06/2002) Three disused military bases in rural England are being prepared to accommodate the huge influx of refugees expected from Pakistan and India in the event of war breaking out over Kashmir. The Home Office has drawn up contingency plans to house up to 5,000 from the first wave at two former RAF camps and a former Army centre, which are all in the north of England. If the emergency escalates, ministers plan to use 10 other government properties as emergency holding centres. These would...