Free Republic

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration’s efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...

 A Twin Cities man who was heading on a cruise with his wife told WCCO he witnessed the shootings at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. Mark Lea, a financial adviser from Elk River, talked while passengers were still on lockdown at the airport after police had taken the gunman into custody. He was in the baggage claim area when shots broke out. The latest reports from authorities in Florida say five people were killed and eight others were hurt in the baggage claim area at the Fort Lauderdale Airport. Lea said that the attack was an awful and surreal experience. “It sounded at first like firecrackers, and...

Police are hunting vandals after a series of chapels and shrines were desecrated within the space of a few days in northern Austria. Statues have been beheaded, prayer books burned and sacred images destroyed since the New Year in the Innviertel region on the Bavarian border. On New Year’s Eve, the vandals struck a chapel in the village of St Radegund, damaging a statue of the Virgin Mary before burning prayer books and wooden objects from the chapel in a nearby wood. That same day, another chapel at the nearby town of Auerbach was also attacked, with vandals smashing the...

ussia says it is beginning to draw down its forces fighting in Syria's war. It decisively entered the war in September 2015, and has been a major factor keeping Syrian President Bashar Assad in power. This isn't the first time Russia has made this kind of announcement. "Last March, Putin also announced a withdrawal from Syria," NPR's Lucian Kim reports from Moscow. "Instead, Russia ended up intensifying its war effort." This latest announcement comes on the heels of a major military victory for the Syrian regime — retaking control of rebel-held portions of the northern city of Aleppo. A cease-fire...

Austrian authorities are investigating an unprecedented number of sexual assaults that occurred on New Year’s Eve in the western city of Innsbruck. Eighteen women have so far reported being groped by a crowd of “individuals.” A group of around 10 unidentified individuals carried out the sexual assaults on young women at Innsbruck’s main square where around 25,000 people gathered on New Year’s Eve, senior police official Ernst Kranebitter said, according to The Local. Read more © Leonhard FoegerWomen in Vienna to get ‘anti-rape’ pocket alarms on New Year’s Eve “We’ve not had anything like this happen here before,” Kranebitter added,...

President Obama is planning to transfer at least 22 additional Guantanamo Bay detainees out of the military detention center before he leaves office later this month, DailyMail.com has learned. The group being released will be drawn from those held at Guantanamo - who include an accused senior al Qaeda bomb-maker, the terror group's top financial manager, and two intended 9/11 hijackers, who have all been held in the Cuba-based U.S. detention facility for more than a decade. According to a military source briefed on the process, 22 detainees are being prepared for transfer out of the camp, also known as...

President-elect Donald Trump on Thursday picked former Indiana Senator Dan Coats as director of national intelligence, two sources briefed on the decision told Fox News. The official announcement is expected later this week, according to the AP, as Trump makes final decisions on some of the major positions he needs to fill before he is sworn in on Jan. 20. Coats, a Republican, served as a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee before retiring from Congress last year. He also served as U.S. ambassador to Germany. As director of national intelligence, Coats would oversee an office created after 9/11 to...

President Obama is planning to transfer at least 22 additional Guantanamo Bay detainees out of the military detention center before he leaves office later this month, DailyMail.com has learned. The group being released will be drawn from those held at Guantanamo - who include an accused senior al Qaeda bomb-maker, the terror group's top financial manager, and two intended 9/11 hijackers, who have all been held in the Cuba-based U.S. detention facility for more than a decade. According to a military source briefed on the process, 22 detainees are being prepared for transfer out of the camp, also known as...

A new report by the Pulitzer-winning veteran journalist Seymour Hersh says the Joint Chiefs of Staff has indirectly supported Bashar al-Assad in an effort to help him defeat jihadist groups. Hersh reports the Joint Chiefs sent intelligence via Russia, Germany and Israel on the understanding it would be transmitted to help Assad push back Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State

Arming of Syrian jihadists mirrored disastrous Libya policy By piecing together recently revealed WikiLeaks emails with evidence that has emerged over the past several years, it’s become increasingly clear that President Obama and his secretary of state at the time, Hillary Clinton in 2011, armed the Free Syrian Army rebels in an effort to topple the regime of Bashar al-Assad, mirroring a strategy already under way in Libya to help al-Qaida-affiliated militia overthrow Moammar Gadhafi. A consequence of the strategy was the emergence of ISIS out of the loosely coordinated Free Syrian Army coalition as well as the disastrous Benghazi...

Claiming that Kashmir was an “integral part” of Pakistan, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif on Thursday needled India yet again by praising slain Hizb-ul-Mujahideen militant Burhan Wani as a “vibrant and charismatic leader.” Addressing the inaugural ceremony of a two-day international parliamentary seminar on Kashmir here, Mr. Sharif also praised the spirit and determination of the Kashmiri people for their struggle for the right to self-determination. “Our hearts beat and sink with our Kashmiri brethren,” Radio Pakistan quoted Mr. Sharif as saying. The world needs to tell India that “enough is enough” with regard to its policy towards Kashmir, he said,...

“Now Is Time to Behead Unbelievers” The jihad on churches -- including those in America and Europe. Originally published by the Gatestone Institute.Raymond Ibrahim is a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Reports of Muslims torturing, raping, and forcing Christians to embrace Islam continued to mount throughout the month of October.   Alice Assaf, a Christian woman recounted the experiences of Christians—including her son’s execution for refusing to deny his faith—in a village near Damascus at the hands of the Islamic State.  She also told how the Islamic State massacres children in cruel and unusual ways—including by throwing them...

A prominent American Muslim scholar stated publicly last month that his community is rife with “horrific” antisemitism and racism against non-Muslims — something he said is antithetical to the teachings of Islam, the Canadian Jewish News reported. Sheikh Hamza Yusuf — co-founder of the Islamic liberal arts school Zaytuna College in Berkeley, California — made this assertion while addressing the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) conference in Toronto at the end of December. Yusuf bemoaned witnessing fellow Muslims expressing “some of the worst racism,” especially through “anti-Jewish rhetoric.” Referring to his 20-year relationship with Arab Islamic scholar Sheikh Abdullah Bin...

An Israeli military court convicted an Israeli soldier of manslaughter Wednesday in the fatal shooting of a wounded Palestinian knife attack suspect. The Palestinian, Abdel Fattah al-Sharif, 21, was one of two men accused of stabbing another Israeli soldier in the West Bank city of Hebron in March. Charges were brought against Sgt. Elor Azaria after video footage emerged showing him shooting Sharif in the head as he lay on the ground, injured and already subdued. The second Palestinian suspect had already been shot dead. The case against Azaria has divided opinion among the Israeli public, politicians and members of...

Four Gitmo detainees are slated to be transferred to Saudi Arabia in the next 24 hours, the first of the final wave of up to 20 transfers expected before Inauguration Day, two U.S. officials tell Fox News. The identities of the four detainees are not immediately known. The transfers are proceeding despite renewed opposition from President-elect Donald Trump, who tweeted on Tuesday: “There should be no further releases from Gitmo. These are extremely dangerous people and should not be allowed back onto the battlefield.”

Under Rouhani's term, religious and ethnic minorities have been especially persecuted in Iran. And perhaps the worst abuse of all hasn't even been a domestic one. Iran has grown increasingly militant in its support for Bashar Assad, the tyrant ruling Syria in its current civil war. This support has extended to bombings in the contested Syrian city of Aleppo, where scores of women and children have been massacred in the bloody conflict. And no wonder. For all their wishy washy, middle of the road uncertainty, the moderates are ultimately the same religious zealots that have stolen Iran from its people....

After the German Interior Minister put forth a bold plan on Tuesday to centralize the country’s security apparatus, conservative leaders at the state level have hit back. Bavarian Minister-President Horst Seehofer on Wednesday categorically rejected Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière’s plan to increase federal powers in domestic security. Germany’s domestic intelligence services are currently decentralized, divided between the federal government and the 16 individual state governments. But de Maizière wants to move the states’ powers to Berlin under the federal BfV intelligence service. […] Hesse interior minister Peter Beuth, CDU, called the reform plans “nonsense” and said such swift moves...

Lindsay Lohan penned a poem about the Syrian refugee crisis Tuesday in which she wrote of a desire to help fix “idle ISIS minds.” The 30-year-old actress — who has begun doing advocacy work for Syrian refugees, including providing free energy drinks to some refugee camps — posted the short poem to her Instagram account on Tuesday. “[S]ometimes i hear the voice of the one i loved the most/but in this world we live in of terror/who i am to be the girl who is scared and hurt/when most things that happen i cannot explain [sic],” Lohan begins her poem....

RODRIGO Duterte may have relatives in the Islamic State (IS) global terror network, according to the latest stunning admission from the Philippine president himself. He said some have joined the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF) and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF), two Islamist separatist organisations operating out of the Philippines. “To be frank, I have cousins on the other side, with MI and MN. Some, I heard, are with ISIS,” he was quoted saying during a recent interview with Rappler executive editor Maria Ressa. Duterte appeared to suggest, however, that family ties would not affect the way he deals...

A Jihadi-cartel alliance in the Mexican state of Nuevo León is collaborating to carry out attacks in American cities and ports of entry along the southern border, according to intelligence obtained by Judicial Watch from confidential U.S. and Mexican law enforcement sources. As part of the plan, militant Islamists have arrived recently at the Monterrey International Airport situated in Apodaca, Nuevo León, about 130 miles south of the Texas border. An internal Mexican law enforcement report obtained by Judicial Watch confirms that Islamic terrorists have “people along the border, principally in Tijuana, Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas.” Cartel informants...