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David Chipman, the gun control activist who President Biden nominated today to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) claimed last year that members of the Branch Davidian sect shot down two helicopters during a standoff with federal agents in Waco in 1993. That is certainly an odd statement considering it didn’t happen and Chipman served 25 years with the ATF. Chipman posted the comments as part of a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event and even posted a photograph on the Reddit thread to confirm his identity. In response to a comment about the Waco siege from...

Peter Lance's new book, Triple Cross, (the complete title is: Triple Cross, How Bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI -- And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him) is out in bookstores on 11/21/2006. This is a link to the Able Danger Blog's review of the book. Here is the text of the Harper Collins' press release for the book: TRIPLE CROSS How Bin Laden's Master Spy Penetrated the CIA, the Green Berets and the FBI -- And Why Patrick Fitzgerald Failed to Stop Him By Peter Lance In TRIPLE CROSS, five-time Emmy-award...

A retired FBI agent was indicted on murder charges Thursday for allegedly taking bribes from a mobster to supply him with inside information that led to four underworld slayings in Brooklyn. R. Lindley DeVecchio, 65, was arrested in a case of "confidential leaks, payoffs and death" dating back two decades, District Attorney Charles Hynes said. DeVecchio pleaded not guilty and was released on $1 million bail. He did not speak at his arraignment. One of the two alleged mob hitmen behind the slayings was jailed without bail. The other was in Florida, awaiting extradition.

As the Senate launches its second impeachment trial of Donald Trump next week, its members must confront the deep unfairness of the proceedings. The Senate rashly claimed jurisdiction over a former president, fumbled on the selection of a presiding judge, and ignored the constitutional — not political — standards that should prevail. Further, it has given Trump’s depleted legal team little time or means to present a full defense — the only guarantee that the American people will accept the verdict as fair. Trump’s lawyers will have to accept these unfair conditions, though might conceivably be able to appeal directly...

On September 14, 2018, The New York Times reported the existence of an unverified sexual misconduct allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. The story cited three people who had read a letter sent by the accuser—Christine Blasey Ford—to Sen. Diane Feinstein (D–Calif.). Ford was not interviewed for the story; indeed, she wasn't named. Unconfirmed reports of a teenaged Kavanaugh assaulting a teenaged Ford evidently merited coverage from The Times. This prompts an obvious question: Why is the paper of record now declining to publicize a very troubling allegation against former Vice President Joe Biden? The Times is hardly alone...

Reuters, in its headline for a story reporting the death of Philip Agee, a former CIA agent turned traitor, labeled Agee a "CIA whistle-blower" ("CIA whistle-blower Philip Agee dies in Cuba [1]"). As the blog Little Green Footballs put it [2], Agee was "the traitor who exposed fellow CIA agents to violence and murder by revealing their names" in his 1975 book "Inside the Company: A CIA Diary." Agee, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years both in the United States and in Latin America, resigned from the Agency in 1968 after expressing "disagreement with U.S. support for...

Nearly five years after a powerful truck bomb ripped through a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia – killing 19 Americans and wounding 372 – terrorism charges have been brought against 13 members of the pro-Iran Saudi Hizballah, or “Party of God.” Another, as yet unidentified, person who is linked to the Lebanese Hizballah has also been charged in the attack. According to the indictment returned today by a Federal Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia, nine of the fourteen are charged with 46 separate criminal counts including: conspiracy to kill Americans and employees of the United States, to use...

Video from 1993 has re-emerged showing Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) backing single-payer, government-run health care — though the current Speaker of the House claims to oppose that policy today. Pelosi told a news conference: “I remain a staunch and ardent supporter of the McDermott-Conyers bill.” She was referring to H.R. 1200 of the 103rd Congress, the “American Health Security Act of 1993,” which proposed a “single-payer,” government-run health insurance system.

Two years have now passed since the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history – yet the biggest question about it remains unanswered. The American public is still in the dark as to why Las Vegas gunman Stephen Paddock opened fire on concertgoers outside the Mandalay Bay resort on Oct. 1, 2017, killing 58 and wounding hundreds more. The FBI’s agents and behavior specialists spent more than a year investigating the attack. Officials released clips of nearly 1,200 officer body camera videos, many hours of 911 audio recordings and dozens of handwritten and transcribed witness accounts. But 730 days later,...

Researchers have found a deposit of rare-earth minerals off the coast of Japan that could supply the world for centuries, according to a new study. The study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday, says the deposit contains 16 million tons of the valuable metals. Rare-earth minerals are used in everything from smartphone batteries to electric vehicles. By definition, these minerals contain one or more of 17 metallic rare-earth elements (for those familiar with the periodic table, those are on the second row from the bottom).

Already missing from the news cycle is the story of Muslim leader Siraj Wahhaj, who alerted authorities to the squalid conditions in New Mexico in which his son, two daughters, another man and woman, and 11 children were living.Authorities arrived at the compound to some of the most horrifying conditions they had ever seen, and prosecutors identified the makeshift home as a training ground for militant children, including in carrying out school shootings. The imam’s son had been wanted for kidnapping his own four-year-old child, who had severe disabilities. The body of a young child was recovered from the...

“Cuba and the United States signed an agreement to cooperate in the fight against terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and other international criminal activities on the eve of President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.” (Reuters, Jan. 2017)“Cuban security officials toured Key West drug-war center—A delegation of Cuban government national security officials recently toured the Pentagon’s counter-drug center in Key West (in May, 2016)— a first, signaling a nascent effort in U.S.-Cuban security cooperation. They got a briefing on the work that has been described as Southcom’s command center in the war on drugs.”“Cuba has kept drug trafficking, in check— the U.S. State Department’s...

Two wealthy Ecuadorian brothers, Roberto and William Isaías, who were owners of companies fined and ordered to shut down for illegally trafficking world-wide in aborted baby parts purchased from Planned Parenthood, were arrested by ICE on February 13, 2019. [snip] Roberto and William Isaias, who fled Ecuador to avoid 8-year prison sentences, were principals in California companies DaVinci Biosciences and DV Biologics, and the two career criminals were allowed to stay in the United States by Hillary Clinton’s State Department under “suspicious circumstances” after they donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign fund.

Most of you familiar with the work of Michael Mukasey probably remember him as the federal judge who granted Jose Padilla, an Al Qaeda agent designated an enemy combatant by the Bush administration, access to counsel during his detention in a U.S. military brig. Others might recall his refusal to declare waterboarding synonymous with torture during Senate Judiciary Committee hearings prior to his confirmation as Attorney General. However, the defining moment of his legal career was his oversight of the trial of the 1st World Trade Center bombing conspirators, led by The Blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel-Rahman. It was this historic...

The open extremists operating in the Democratic Party's midst. It turns out the man arrested for running a Muslim terrorist training compound in rural New Mexico is the son of an influential Democrat-connected jihadist imam who was close to the Blind Sheikh who orchestrated the bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 that left six people dead. Siraj Ibn Wahhaj Jr., who is 39 or 40, of Clayton County, Ga., was arrested after authorities found 11 hungry, filthy children living in squalid conditions in a remote part of New Mexico. Wahhaj, who has been charged with felony child abuse,...

Al Qaeda's Hidden Roots By Laurie Mylroie The American Spectator | September 25, 2006 Cyrus Nowrasteh, scriptwriter for ABC's docudrama The Path to 9/11, defends the film's controversial, invented scenes, noting that the first attack on the World Trade Center occurred one month after Bill Clinton took office, and eight years passed in which Clinton did little to thwart the growing menace. Nowrasteh makes a crucial point, but it is not necessary to resort to fiction. Our understanding of the terrorist attacks -- going back to the 1993 Trade Center bombing -- has become loaded with errors obscuring Clinton's fecklessness....

<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>

When the sun rose on April 19, 1993, it marked the 51st day of a standoff between dozens of federal agents and members of an apocalyptic religious sect called the Branch Davidians, who had barricaded themselves in their compound outside Waco, Texas.

I stand by every word of it. And it’s even worse today. Of the thousands of Clinton presidential records released to the public last week, one among them has received of the bulk of attention: a 332-page memo from 1995. The memo, which offers an in-depth analysis of the right-wing media, describes how conservative conspiracy theories about the Clintons passed from the fringes to the mainstream. (...) Let’s go all the way back to the summer of 1995. At the time, my then colleague (and current business partner) Mark Fabiani and I were working at the White House as lawyers...

President Clinton today dismissed William S. Sessions, the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, who had stubbornly rejected an Administration ultimatum to resign six months after a harsh internal ethics report on his conduct. Mr. Clinton said he would announce his nominee to replace Mr. Sessions on Tuesday. He was expected to pick Judge Louis J. Freeh of Federal District Court in Manhattan; officials said Judge Freeh had impressed Mr. Clinton favorably on Friday at their first meeting. Mr. Clinton, explaining his reasons for removing Mr. Sessions, effective immediately, said, "We cannot have a leadership vacuum at an agency...