Free Republic

Robert O’Neill, the famous Navy SEAL who helped kill Osama bin Laden, says the “believe survivors” refrain surrounding Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s accuser is never used in conjunction with the 2012 Benghazi terror attack. The SEAL Team 6 member who took out the United States’ most wanted terrorist during operation Neptune’s Spear added some military perspective this weekend to the controversy surrounding President Trump’s top pick to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. O’Neill asked his social media followers why sexual misconduct allegations — like those leveled by California college professor Christine Blasey Ford towards Judge Kavanaugh — are supposed to...

Pg 104…to 107 The third team selected to go into the box was 585….on October 25, 2001, the weather cleared and TIGER 03’s ten Special Forces sergeants finally reached their landing zone outside Dasht-e-Qaleh, a village in the upper northeast corner near the Tajikistan border.

According to a Wednesday night post on the website Long War Journal by Thomas Joscelyn, a former detainee held at Guantanamo Bay named Ibrahim Qosi has rejoined the world of Islamic terrorism and ascended to a leadership post in al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) following his release in July 2012. With this shocking story coming as the Obama administration still hopes to close the prison, the question going forward from a media standpoint is this: Will the media show any interest in this threat to national security and failure on the part of the adminstration? According to Joscelyn, Qoosi...

The former cook of al-Qaeda's Osama bin Laden has had his Guantanamo prison sentence reduced to two years from 14, under a plea agreement that remains secret. The US military said Ibrahim al-Qosi's sentence had been reduced on Wednesday, contingent on his adherence to agreed upon terms. Those terms included an agreement not to engage in or materially support hostilities against the United States or its coalition partners. Al-Qosi, who is about 50, acknowledged in his plea agreement that he knew al-Qaeda was a terrorist group when he ran one of the kitchens in bin Laden's Star of Jihad compound...

Letter from Bin Laden found on body of Saudi bomber By John R Bradley in Jeddah 19 August 2003 A letter from Osama bin Laden and a telephone call made from Iran by his son Saad are linked to a series of al-Qa'ida attacks on Westerners in Saudi Arabia, according to Western diplomats and Saudi intelligence officials. The letter from al-Qa'ida's leader was found on the body of Yosif Salih Fahd Alayeeri, one of 19 attackers involved in a closely co-ordinated series of bombings in Riyadh in May, who was killed in a shootout with security forces in central Saudi...

The house is primitive, constructed of baked mud and stone. The landscape is sparse and mountainous, with snow cover in the winter. The terrain is rugged and challenging for the long walks the owner liked to take with his sons. Photographs quietly introduced as evidence in the latest major terrorism trial in Manhattan federal court offer a rare look inside Osama bin Laden's lair -- years before al Qaeda flew hijacked planes into buildings or bombed U.S. embassies in Africa and even before the FBI placed bin Laden on its Most Wanted List.

Overnight, five more Guantanamo Bay detainees were released from American custody as the process of emptying out the prison facility accelerates. That brings the total of Guantanamo detainees released just this month to nine. “The two men from Tunisia and three from Yemen — who have been at the camp for a dozen years — had been cleared for release from the prison by a government task force but could not be sent to their homelands,” Fox News reported on Wednesday.Of the approximately 800 Guantanamo prisoners who were housed in that facility during the Bush administration, only 127 now remain....

In 2001, a small U.S. special operations force had won extraordinary victories in Afghanistan and closed in on Bin Laden before high-level blunders allowed him to escape into Pakistan. Exactly twelve years ago, during the cold Winter days between December 10-16, in the jagged mountains of Tora Bora that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, Osama bin Laden walked unencumbered into Pakistan and disappeared for nine and a half years. Just before, however, bin Laden had made an egregious error. After spending a couple seconds too long on his radio, the CIA pinpointed bin Laden’s location to within ten meters. One hour...

Bulgarian media on Thursday named the suicide bomber who blew up a bus full of Israeli tourists, killing five Israelis and a local bus driver, in the Black Sea resort of Burgas on Wednesday as 36-year-old Mehdi Ghezali. Ghezali reportedly arrived in Bulgaria five weeks before the bombing and arrived at the airport via taxi, Channel 2 reported. He was also reportedly given the bomb by someone else, but no further details were provided. [Snip] Ghezali has a Wikipedia page, which describes him as a Swedish citizen, with Algerian and Finnish origins. He had been held at the US’s...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – Former Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden entered Pakistan across the Afghan border during the early months of U.S. attacks on Afghanistan, then spent nine years on the run in Pakistan living in several safe houses and fathering four children. Testimony from bin Laden's youngest wife -- the 29-year-old Yemenite Amal Ahmed Abdulfattah -- before a joint investigation team in Pakistan reveals the Al Qaeda kingpin fled over the border into Pakistan early in 2002, just after the U.S. launched attacks on Tora Bora in eastern Afghanistan.

The last time Gary Berntsen went after such a formidable adversary in hostile territory, he was commanding a small band of fellow spies and commandos in pursuit of Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan after 9/11. After helping drive the Taliban from power, they tracked him to the mountains of Tora Bora, only to see him slip away. His current assignment could make that one look easy. Mr. Berntsen, a Long Island-bred C.I.A. operative who retired in 2005, decided earlier this year to try to serve his country in a new, and not exactly clandestine, way: by running for office. While...

President Obama unveils his new Afghanistan strategy today, and in the nick of time Senator John Kerry has arrived with a report claiming that none of this would be necessary if former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had only deployed more troops eight years ago. Yes, he really said more troops. In a 43-page report issued yesterday by his Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Mr. Kerry says bin Laden and deputy Ayman Zawahiri were poised for capture at the Tora Bora cave complex in late 2001. But because of the "unwillingness" of Mr. Rumsfeld and his generals "to deploy the troops required...

I have been avoiding writing about the Senate report that the United States Military let Bin Laden slip through their fingers at Tora Bora for a few reasons. First of all its old news, we have been hearing this story for at least two years. Additionally elections (and wars) have their consequences, the winners get to write history. While it is accepted that we could have gotten Bin Laden in his Tora Bora cave eight years ago, this report was written by the staffers of highly partisan Senator John "why the long face" Kerry, so the details/reasons surrounding the incident...

Washington, DC (AHN) - A new Senate report blasts the Bush administration's December 2001 effort to capture or kill al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden in the Afghanistan mountains of Tora Bora. The report, written by the Senate Foreign Relations, says bin Laden was within reach on Dec. 16, but he and his "entourage of bodyguards walked unmolested out of Tora Bora and disappeared into Pakistan's unregulated tribal area." The report says most analysts believe he is still there. The report, requested by the committee's chairman, Massachusetts Democrat John Kerry, blames the failure to catch or kill bin Laden on...

WASHINGTON - Osama bin Laden was unquestionably within reach of U.S. troops in the mountains of Tora Bora when American military leaders made the crucial and costly decision not to pursue the terrorist leader with massive force, a Senate report says.

As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001. “Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure...

SNIPPET: "The leader of the al Qaeda-linked Chinese terror group has threatened to attack Chinese interests around the world to avenge the death of Uighurs in the eastern province of Xianjiang. Abdul Haq al Turkistani, the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party, threatened to attack Chinese embassies worldwide as well as targets within the country. Haq made his threats on a video that was released on an Islamist Internet site." SNIPPET: "Haq, who is also known as Maimaitiming Maimaiti, became the leader of the Eastern Turkistan Islamic Party in late 2003 after Hassan Mahsum, the group’s previous leader, was...

SNIPPET: "On Thursday, April 2, a federal judge ruled that Guantánamo detainee Hedi Hammamy is being held for good reasons. Judge Richard Leon of the DC District Court found the US government’s evidence was sufficient to show that Hammamy supported al Qaeda and the Taliban. Hammamy, who is also known as Abdul Haddi bin Hadiddi in the US government’s unclassified Guantánamo files, was arrested by Pakistani authorities in April 2002 and transferred to Guantánamo months later. Government prosecutors demonstrated that Hammamy’s passport was recovered in a cave in the Tora Bora Mountains, which were the main fallback zone for fleeing...

<p>WASHINGTON (AP) — A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the United States to release a prisoner from the Guantanamo detention center.</p> <p>U.S. District Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle issued a one-page judgment ordering the release of Yasin Muhammed Basardh, a 33-year-old from Yemen.</p>

A 21-year-old citizen of Chad who has been held for seven years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba must be released, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the government had not proven that Mohammed el Gharani was an enemy combatant and the detainee must be freed and sent home soon either to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised and his family lives, or Chad. Leon's ruling comes just before President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the prison camp, takes office on Tuesday. Since Obama's election in November, federal...