Free Republic

Without America there would be no Islamic State. Indeed, without America there would have been no Cold War. Without the Cold War there would have been no need to arm and train the Mujahideen against the Soviets. Without the Mujahideen there would have been no Al Qaeda. Without Al Qaeda there would have been no Iraq War. And without the Iraq War there would have been no Islamic State. Or as President Barack Obama put it: ISIL is a direct outgrowth of Al Qaeda in Iraq which grew out of our invasion which is an example of unintended consequences which...

Iraq uncovers al-Qaeda 'chemical weapons plot' The authorities in Iraq say they have uncovered an al-Qaeda plot to use chemical weapons, as well as to smuggle them to Europe and North America. Defence ministry spokesman Mohammed al-Askari said five men had been arrested after military intelligence monitored their activities for three months. Three workshops for manufacturing the chemical agents, including sarin and mustard gas, were uncovered, he added. Remote-controlled toy planes were also seized at the workshops. Mr Askari said they were to have been used to release the chemical agents over the target from a "safe" distance of 1.5km...

The sniper's plan: kill six whites a day for 30 days By Harry Mount in New York (Filed: 25/05/2006) One of the two snipers who murdered 10 people in a killing spree that terrorised Washington has revealed their plans to kill hundreds of children, policemen and rescue workers in an attempt to shut down cities across the country. John Allen Muhammad, 45, and his accomplice, Lee Boyd Malvo, 21, brought America's capital to a standstill in 2002 as they picked off white targets at petrol stations and shops in the city's prosperous suburbs. Muhammad: ‘a coward’ Malvo testified that Muhammad,...

Shocking enough are the allegations that a long-perceived unassuming state senator tried brokering an international arms deal with military-style rifles and rocket launchers, but Leland Yee may have narrowly escaped an even more ominous label: supporter of terrorism. Yee, whose arrest after an FBI undercover sting shook the California political world last week, would likely have been charged with aiding terrorists if not for a bureaucratic label missing from the militant Filipino group that he is accused of sourcing for an international arms deal, counterterrorism experts told this newspaper. His ties to the group, whose leader has said he personally...

Pakistani officials are furious with Showtime after watching the fourth season of its hit show “Homeland, which they say portrays their country as an ugly, ignorant, terror-plagued “hellhole.” “Our culture embraces Western society. Pakistan believes in the democratic system of voting in our presidents.“Pakistanis never embraced the dictators who, in the past, ruled the country because they took over the presidency through violent means.

.... Di-Natale provided coverage of the [Osama bin Laden] raid's aftermath, including an exclusive interview with Shakil Afridi, the doctor who helped U.S. agents verify Bin Laden's presence, and who remains imprisoned in Pakistan to this day. Di-Natale notably reported from Osama bin Laden's Pakistan compound in the aftermath of the US raid, and is known for chiseling out a brick from the compound: Call me a conspiracy theorist, but when I heard about Di-Natale's death, the first thing that popped into my mind was this: Who killed him? It isn't that far-fetched to suspect foul play when a journalist...

The location and elimination of Osama bin Laden was among the greatest achievements of the American intelligence community in the War on Terror — and “enhanced interrogation” had nothing do with it, according to the Senate Democrats’ “torture” report, released earlier this week. According to the much-touted study, “the vast majority of the documents, statements, and testimony highlighting information [that enabled the bin Laden operation] from the use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques, or from CIA detainees more generally, was inaccurate and incongruent with CIA records.” The minority report released by six Senate Intelligence Committee Republicans claims differently. The...

EARNEST: The president's view is wherever you come down on this equation of yes, it yielded information that was helpful, yes it yielded information that was crucial, or no it didn't yield any helpful information. The president believes regardless of what the answer to that question is, that the use of these techniques was not worth it because of the harm that was done to our national values and the sense of what we believe in as Americans.

I salute their service and sacrifice Many in the community are…infuriated, [O’Neill] says. “There’s a shitstorm around this.”—Rob O’Neill referring to SEALs going public, “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden…Is Screwed” “Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”—Then Defense Secretary, Robert Gates 5/12/11 Our present POTUS tells lies like they are an art form he is determined to master. God knows he has shown a remarkable flair for it—although if...

Full, Nothing Held Back, Almost Entire Story in The Title, Title: EXCLUSIVE - Navy SEAL who killed bin Laden revealed: Rob O'Neill named as SEAL Team Six hero who shot 9/11 mastermind three times in head - and has already inspired series of Hollywood films The Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden dead in the special force's most famous operation can be named today. The Navy hero is set to give a full interview to Fox News later this month and waive his anonymity but MailOnline has established that he is Rob O'Neill, a highly-decorated veteran who quit after...

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...

Post your conditions or noticable behavior of your city officials here. Little Rock-

Just hours before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton was in Australia telling businessmen that he “could have killed” Osama Bin Laden during his presidency, but chose not to, MSNBC reports. “I nearly got him,” he says on newly-released recordings of the September 10 meeting. “And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.” Michael Kroger, one...

A victory beyond the wildest dreams of Osama bin Laden is within reach of fighters from ISIL, a group of which he would likely approve regardless of what current Al Qaeda leadership says about the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. And it's all Obama's fault. “Iraqi troops battled to dislodge an al Qaeda splinter group from the city of Tikrit on Monday,” reports the Hindustan Times, “after its leader was declared caliph of a new Islamic state in lands seized this month across a swathe of Iraq and Syria.” The caliphate claims worldwide authority over all Muslims, and...

Tragically, all we’ve fought for in Iraq, all that 4,500 American lives were shed to gain, is on the cusp, potentially, of vanishing. - Mitt Romney, “Ideas Summit,” 6/13/2014 All we fought for in Iraq. All we fought for in Iraq is on the cusp of vanishing. That’s what Mitt Romney says. We fought for. We fought for. We. Oh, so it’s we now, is it, Mitt? We. I must have missed you over there, but it was a busy place. We. The guy who helped set up “pro-draft” rallies and yet somehow managed to avoid service in Vietnam is...

Iraqi Al Qaeda's entry into Syria's civil war caused "a political disaster" for Islamist militants there, the movement's global leader Ayman al-Zawahri said in a video message, urging the faction to redouble its efforts in Iraq instead. Zawahri has repeatedly tried to end infighting between the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) and another Al Qaeda-aligned group, the Nusra Front. He said on May 2 in a message translated by SITE Monitoring that if ISIL had accepted his decision not to get involved in Syria and had instead worked to "busy itself with Iraq, which needs double its...

The founder of a radical Islamic website that praised figures like Osama bin Laden and Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan has been sentenced to 2½ years in prison for using the site to threaten Jewish groups. Yousef al-Khattab, 45, of Atlantic City, N.J., had converted from Judaism and started the Revolution Muslim website in 2007. …

A camp on the Libyan coastline meant to train terror-hunters has instead become a haven for terrorists and al Qaeda. A key jihadist leader and longtime member of al Qaeda has taken control of a secretive training facility set up by U.S. special operations forces on the Libyan coastline to help hunt down Islamic militants... In the summer of 2012, American Green Berets began refurbishing a Libyan military base 27 kilometers west of Tripoli in order to hone the skills of Libya’s first Western-trained special operations counter-terrorism fighters. Less than two years later, that training camp is now being used...

Excerpted from "Rebel Music: Race, Empire, and the New Muslim Culture" One of the odder phenomena of the last decade is hearing national security elites, terrorism experts, and career diplomats discuss the finer points of “flow,” “bling,” and the “politics of cool.” American and European terrorism experts have increasingly expressed concerns over “anti-American hip-hop,” accenting the radicalizing influence of the genre. Noting that Al-Shabaab, the Somali-based Islamist group, uses “jihad rap” in its recruitment videos, Harvard scholar Jessica Stern wrote in Foreign Affairs: “The first- and second-generation Muslim children I interviewed for a study of the sources of radicalization in...

Special operations sources have claimed that the terror leader was shot more than one hundred times in the fatal 2011 raid. A new report from a website known within the intelligence and armed services community claims that the sheer number of times that Osama bin Laden was shot is the reason why the government has never released photos of his dead body. Citing two confidential sources, The Special Operations Forces Situation Report tells how 'operator after operator took turns dumping magazines-worth of ammunition into Bin Laden’s body'. The site goes on to argue that while the Navy SEALs may have...