Free Republic

Around 50 retired US diplomats have written to US President George Bush to complain about America's policy towards the Middle East. The letter is similar to one written by 52 former British diplomats to UK Prime Minister Tony Blair last week. The former US diplomats complained that President Bush's approach is losing the US "credibility, prestige and friends". They criticised what they say is Washington's unabashed support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. The American diplomats said they were deeply concerned by Mr Bush's endorsement last month of Mr Sharon's plan to withdraw unilaterally from Gaza. 'Great danger' They were...

........A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions....

Did OKC bombers join TWA 800 plot? Posted: April 20, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com In light of what we know now we need to look back at a whole bunch of things that happened in the 1990s to see if there might be an al-Qaida connection and that would include the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA 800 flight. There may be no connection to terrorism, but boy do we need to take a second look at it.– Herbert Meyer, Reagan-era special assistant to CIA director, on "Fox and Friends," April 15, 2004 In this generation, no single reporter has...

In 1997-1998, I became aware of clearly observable warnings of hostile terrorist intentions against America, by Osama bin Laden. For over eighteen months -- as part of an investigation for Reader's Digest -- I had been learning from a variety of former U.S. intelligence officers and foreign sources about a vast, world wide network of Islamist radicals, who had emerged from the U.S.-backed war to drive the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. At their head was the shadowy Saudi renegade, Osama bin Laden, whom his followers referred to as the "Prince of Jihad." What made bin Laden unusual was his background....

WASHINGTON (AP) — Just weeks before Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, U.S. intelligence and law enforcement received several warnings that Islamic terrorists were seeking to strike on American soil and that a likely target was government buildings, documents show. The information, though it was never linked to McVeigh, was stark enough that the Clinton administration urged stepped up security patrols and screening at federal buildings nationwide, including those in Oklahoma. The government, however, didn't fortify buildings with cement barriers like those hurriedly installed after McVeigh detonated his explosive-laden truck at the curb of the Murrah...

<p>STRANGE CELL-FELLOW: Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the '93 WTC bombing, in 1996, when he began spilling to a jail "friend."</p> <p>April 11, 2004 -- The 9/11 commission has been given an FBI report detailing mobster-turned-spy Gregory Scarpa Jr.'s 1996 prison exchanges with terrorist Ramzi Yousef. The Post's Al Guart reports how a Brooklyn hood became America's unlikely agent in the war on terror.</p>

Military retaliation from Baghdad was the main administration concern following Saturday's strike on Iraq. Yet U.S. officials should start thinking seriously about the question of retaliation through terror. It is quite possible, for example, that there was a connection between Saddam and recent attempts to blow up Manhattan. It is quite possible that New York's terror is Saddam's revenge. Speculation about the responsibility for last week's bombing plot and the earlier World Trade Center bombing has focused on Iran, Sudan, and the fundamentalist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Much energy has been spent linking the terror to Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Saddam,...

<p>LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.</p>

<p>Books about public policy and the careers of bureaucrats rarely become national sensations. But Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies is generating intense interest far beyond Washington's Beltway.</p> <p>Clarke, the former top White House counterterrorism official, says President Bush and his advisers ignored his warnings in 2001 that an al-Qaeda attack was imminent and were fixated on going to war in Iraq.</p>

'I met Osama Bin Laden in Kabul. It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation' It makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles — which was “blown up” in the film Independence Day — were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief. “We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors. He recounted...

Did Nichols and Yousef meet? Closer analysis of Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef timelines creates a compelling, if still circumstantial, case — and offers clues to where the smoking guns may be found By J.M. BERGER INTELWIRE.com In November 1994, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef both walked on the grounds of the same college campus in the Philippines. Whether their paths crossed is a question that still dogs researchers. But it's increasingly clear that what separates their respective itineraries is sometimes a matter of yards, feet or even inches, within a span of days, hours and sometimes mere minutes. They...

In this edition of Frontpage Interview, we have the privilege of being joined by Dr. Laurie Mylroie, one of the foremost American scholars on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. In her book Study of Revenge: Saddam Hussein´s Unfinished War against America, Dr. Mylroie provided substantial evidence implicating Saddam's involvement in four terrorist attacks: the 1993 World Trade Center Bombing; the 1995 bombing in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, the 1996 attack on the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, and the 1998 bombings of two African embassies. The author of the new book, Bush vs. the Beltway: How the CIA and the State Department...

Reprinted from NewsMax.com Sunday Jan. 4, 2004; 11:43 p.m. ESTClinton Administration Freed Bin Laden's Banker A Saudi national known to investigators as Osama bin Laden's "banker" was apprehended inside the U.S. in 1994 - only to be set free by the Clinton administration in a decision that was considered a "massive loss" in the war on terrorism by U.S. intelligence officials. Bin Laden brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa was believed to be "the real money man" behind the scenes for the 9/11 mastermind, reports investigative journalist Peter Lance, in his comprehensive overview of the 9/11 attacks, "1,000 Years For Revenge: International...

A New Tactic? Dec. 5— Authorities in the United Kingdom are examining a pair of blue socks, which they believe contain key components of an improved explosive device that could be used in future terrorist airline hijackings, intelligence sources told ABCNEWS. Intelligence officials believe the socks were designed to be filled with explosives and tethered and worn around a potential bomber's neck, a source told ABCNEWS. With the explosives concealed in this fashion, a bomber could gain access to an aircraft and assemble the improvised device once on board. The socks were seized during the Nov. 20 arrest of Sajid...

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters The National Interest by Laurie Mylroie 1995/96 NOTE: Laurie Mylroie, formerly of Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College, is currently with the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia. She was co-author of the bestseller, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Random House 1990), and has just completed a sequel, 'Study of Revenge': Saddam's Terror Against America. . ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the ...

FX Books Film on 9/11 'Revenge' By Andrew Wallenstein NEW YORK (Hollywood Reporter) - Cable channel FX is developing a film based on a controversial book contending that the Sept. 11 attacks could have been avoided. The book, "1000 Years for Revenge: International Terrorism and the FBI (news - web sites) (The Untold Story)," was published in September by HarperCollins' ReganBooks imprint. Author Peter Lance traces 12 years of terrorist efforts masterminded by Ramzi Achmed Yousef, who had been plotting various attacks since his role in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. "Revenge" culminates in the...

Just days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the INS deported Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, even though the FBI had evidence that linked the Saudi businessman to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Bojinka plot and Oklahoma City. Not only was Khalifa deported to Jordan, where he was subsequently freed, but the U.S. government let him leave with potentially incriminating evidence and cleared his record of terrorism charges. Evidence in the FBI's possession at the time potentially implicated the Saudi businessman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the airliner bombing plot and the Oklahoma City...

Deathbed Confession Links Sadaam Hussein to the Oklahoma City Bombing "Deathbed" Confession Transcript -- World Exclusive Posted April 19, 2002 The following interview with ELMINA ABDUL, widow of EDWIN ANGELES, one of the cofounders of the ABU SAYYAF GROUP (ASG), and deep cover agent for the Defense Intelligence Group (DIG) of the Department of National Defense (DND), of the Republic of the Philippines, was taken on March 10, 2002, in the presence of CHRISTOPHER M. PUNO, Information Officer of the Province of Basilan, at BASCOM Hospital, in the general ward. TRANSLATED TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW WITH ELMINA ABDUL, WIDOW TO EDWIN...

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Bush administration has evidence of some prewar Iraqi contacts and training with al-Qaida, based on prisoner interrogations, defector statements and documents collected in Iraq and Afghanistan, but no proof of joint terror operations, according to U.S. officials. Most of the administration's public assertions have focused on a supporter of Osama bin Laden, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He is believed to have run terrorist training camps in both Iraq and Afghanistan and received medical care in Baghdad. U.S. officials have accused al-Zarqawi of trying to train terrorists in the use of poison for possible attacks in Europe,...

<p>August 28, 2003 -- Terrorism mastermind Ramzi Yousef is making a last-ditch bid to overturn his convictions for bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 and plotting to blow up 12 U.S. airlines.</p> <p>Yousef's lawyer, Bernard Kleinman, petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court to hear the case after the New York federal court of appeals upheld the convictions in April.</p>