Free Republic

Islamabad: Jamiat Ulema-e-Islami Fazl (JUI-F) Chief Maulana Fazlur Rehman following the Friday sermon requested the armed forces of Pakistan to launch a military operation against “jeans-wearing women” all over Pakistan in a press conference at a local hotel in Islamabad. Fazlur Rehman while highlighting the demerits of an operation against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) said that the Taliban were not Pakistan’s enemy and the forces needed to target the real enemies of Pakistan. “The Taliban are our brothers and their angst against the state is justified,” Fazl said adding that, “As brother Ansar Abbasi has so eloquently put in the...

Some of the latest propaganda coming out of ISIS seems to indicate that they’re not satisfied with being the JV team and are looking to move up to the major leagues. Rather than just taking over the occasional town or embarking on genocidal purges, at least some of the terror group’s leadership is pondering the possibility of investing their cash in tactical weapons. They tossed out this idea by way of an article written by British hostage John Cantlie, who frequently publishes their English language advertising. It’s important to remember that, at least for the time being, this is...

ISLAMIC State (ISIS) are poised to buy its first nuclear bomb "within a year", the terror group claimed tonight.The jihadists are looking to get hold of an atomic weapon or thousands of tonnes of ammonium nitrate explosive. The merciless organisation says it hopes to purchase a nuclear device “through weapons dealers with links to corrupt officials” in Pakistan. But it admits that obtaining the deadly weapon may be a challenge and says it would settle for a “few thousand tons of ammonium nitrate explosive”. The chilling boast was made in the latest edition of its propaganda ‘magazine’ circulated to publicise...

In May 1990, then-U.S. President George H.W. Bush was convinced that Pakistan was poised to use a covert nuclear weapon capability against India. The impending apocalypse—which would have dwarfed Hiroshima and Nagasaki—had to be prevented at all costs. Consequently, the White House dispatched a trusted emissary, Robert Gates (a man who would later become U.S. Defense Secretary in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations) on a top secret mission to South Asia—first to Pakistan and then to India. Eventually on May 21, 1990, it was concluded that the Gates mission had indeed succeeded and, paradoxically, the sense that the...

Saudi Arabia will join the nuclear club by buying “off the shelf” atomic weapons from Pakistan, US officials told a London newspaper.

What Pakistan Knew About the Bin Laden Raid Husain Haqqani With a litany of unproved claims, veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh has revived discussion about the circumstances in which al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was discovered and killed in May 2011 in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad. Some of Hersh’s assertions in a 10,000-word London Review of Books article border on fantasy. He claims that bin Laden lived under the protection of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was given up for reward money by one of the agency’s officers, and was eventually eliminated in a U.S. raid covertly backed...

Washington — An alliance of Asian American groups on Friday filed a federal complaint against HarvardUniversity, saying that school and other Ivy League institutions are using racial quotas to admit students other than high-scoring Asians. More than 60 Chinese, Indian, Korean and Pakistani groups came together for the complaint, which was filed with the civil rights offices at the Justice and Education departments. They are calling for an investigation and say these schools should stop using racial quotas or racial balancing in admission. "We are seeking equal treatment regardless of race," said Chunyan Li, a professor and civil rights activist,...

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg carelessly waded into a political conflict of words between Pakistanis and Indians when he posted an infographic on the site featuring a map of India, excluding the disputed territory of Kashmir. Inevitably, the post–which was shared to celebrate the “countries connected” by his internet.org project– sparked outrage among the Facebook community and led to Zuckerberg taking down the post. It did not take long for Indians to notice the mistake and angry comments began pouring in from across the world. “Great Job, Please correct the Indian MAP on this Picture, Kashmir is Missing,” said one comment...

The 2016 presidential election is attracting an unusually large number of hopefuls. The Republicans will probably field more than a dozen candidates and the Democrats, as many as five. Presently, very few of these supposed contenders have a real chance of becoming president. Republicans Ben Carson, Carly Fiorina and Ted Cruz are long shots. On the Democratic side, that term applies to everyone but Hillary Rodham Clinton.. ~snip~ If you tell them in private, "You do not have a chance to be president," they will point to underdogs who won, such as Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan, or front-runners who...

Elite special forces are some of the best-trained and most formidable units a country can boast. They go where other soldiers fear to tread, scoping out potential threats, taking out strategic targets, and conducting daring rescue missions. These really are the best of the best. Although it's extremely difficult to rank these forces relative to one another, there are some units that rise above the rest in their track record and the fear they instill in their adversaries. These soldiers have been through rigorous training exercises designed to weed out those who can't hit their exacting standards. In a world...

As soon as legendary journalist Sy Hersh's controversial story on the Osama bin Laden raid was published Sunday night, critics pounced and skeptics ripped his account because of its reliance on anonymous sourcing and its lack of documentary evidence. Now a respected New York Times foreign correspondent, who was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes about a key detail "in Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden story that rings true." Carlotta Gall writes that she also learned from sources that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, had kept bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that the CIA learned about his location from a Pakistani...

R.J. Hillhouse, a former professor, Fulbright fellow and novelist whose writing on intelligence and military outsourcing has appeared in the Washington Post and New York Times, made the same main assertions in 2011 about the death of Osama bin Laden as Seymour Hersh’s new story in the London Review of Books — apparently based on different sources than those used by Hersh. Bin Laden was killed by Navy SEALs on May 2, 2011. Three months later, on August 7, Hillhouse posted a story on her blog “The Spy Who Billed Me” stating that (1) the U.S. did not learn about...

Much of Seymour Hersh’s extensive London Review of Books exposé of the attack that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011 merely reiterates what common sense had argued all along. Pakistani intelligence could not have been unaware that Osama bin Laden was hiding in Abbottabad. Pakistani intelligence could not have been kept entirely in the dark about the plot to kill Osama bin Laden. Despite all the public breast beating and name calling, US and Pakistan were very much working together. The “treasure trove” of materials recovered from the compound actually yielded little. There were no garbage bags filled with computers...

This weekend, a dozen Republican presidential hopefuls showed up at the South Carolina Freedom Summit. They were there to court primary voters who will winnow the presidential field next February. Judging from the speeches, it’s going to be an ugly race. What the candidates are selling, and primary voters are buying, is vituperation against people who don’t look, talk, or pray like the Republican base.............. [SNIP of stuff that sounds good to me - Santorum was on fire] ...............Mexicans, Muslims, gays, rats, roaches. Christian superiority, military contempt for the president, and gauntlets thrown down to queer-loving CEOs. It’s going to...

One of America’s most revered investigative journalists has questioned the veracity of one of the Obama administration’s proudest achievements — and the firestorm of criticism has been immediate and unforgiving, from the White House to the Pentagon to the CIA. The publication Sunday of a 10,000-word article questioning the official version of the 2011 raid that killed Al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden might have received scant attention had it it not been penned by Seymour Hersh. The award-winning reporter, 78, who uncovered one of the worst war crimes by U.S. troops during the Vietnam War and disclosed the torture...

By Ben Kamisar - The former Navy SEAL who says he killed Osama bin Laden is slamming a new report that challenges the White House’s account of the mission, calling it “garbage.” “The story that I read, the part from [Seymour] Hersh, was full of lies,” Rob O’Neill said on Fox News's "Shepard Smith Reporting." “It took me a long time to read it because I had to put it down — I couldn’t read the nonsense.” Hersh on Sunday published in story in the London Review of Books that says Pakistani intelligence officers played a significant role in the...

Veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh is vigorously defending a controversial new story that claims the White House lied about crucial details of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.Hersh's story, published in the London Review of Books on May 10, alleges that the US government misled the public about many of the details surrounding the 2011 raid on bin Laden's compound in Abottabad, Pakistan.Relying largely on a single anonymous source, described only as a retired senior US intelligence official, Hersh claims that Pakistani intelligence officials were aware of and actively hiding bin Laden.He claims that the intelligence tip that led...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist says that raid which killed Osama Bin Laden in 2011 is ‘one big lie'. He says the US media is too 'afraid' to pick on Obama. Hersh, 76, says the solution is to shut down news networks like NBC and ABC. He also suggested the firing of 90 per cent of mainstream editors.

In an interview with The Guardian (U.K.) published Friday, the left-leaning Seymour Hersh, best known for his Pulitzer-winning reporting that exposed the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War, unloaded on the American news media for its underwhelming coverage of the Obama White House. Hersh told The Guardian’s Lisa O’Carroll that the ABC and NBC news bureaus ought to be shut down and 90 percent of the editors fired for sake of fixing journalism. “I’ll tell you the solution, get rid of 90 percent of the editors that now exist and start promoting editors that you can’t control,” Hersh said....

Citing interviews with “a retired senior intelligence official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad” and American sources who “had access to corroborating information,” Hersh writes that the American government did not act alone in locating and killing Bin Laden, as it has consistently claimed. On the contrary, Hersh’s sources say that senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI)—Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA—knew as early as 2006 that Bin Laden was in Abbottabad, and cooperated with the U.S. in the assassination. Specifically, the story says that top Pakistani Army Gen. Ashfaq...