Free Republic

- Each year, the U.S. State Department formally rebukes and imposes penalties on governments that protect and promote terrorists. But since 1996, when the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan, the nation harboring Osama bin Laden has never made the department's list of terrorist-sponsoring countries. The omission reflects more than a decade of vexing relations between the United States and Afghanistan, a period that found the State Department more focused on U.S. oil interests and women's rights than on the growing terrorist threat, according to experts and current and former officials. It was not until 1998, when two U.S. embassy bombings ...

Brig. Gen. Terryl Schwalier was stunned when he read the account of the June 25, 1996 Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia that appeared in my recent book, Countdown to Crisis: the Coming Nuclear Showdown with Iran. I was writing many years after the fact, drawing on sources from inside Iranian intelligence but also on published U.S. government reports. It was those U.S. reports that prompted General Schwalier to contact me a few months ago. “You paint a picture of significant government awareness that “Iran was up to something” in the months prior to the Khobar Towers attack,” he wrote...

President Barack Obama has been challenged before about his alleged ties to the “New Party,” a far-left political group that once served as a third party option in the American political schema. Last month, The Blaze highlighted some images that seemed to corroborate the president’s alleged past ties to groups like the Democratic Socialists of America and, alas, the New Party, despite his campaign’s 2008 denial that he was a member of the movement. As noted, a picture of Obama was published on the cover of the New Party News pamphlet back in 1996, serving as a small sliver of...

In his stunning 2003 book Dereliction of Duty, Air Force Lt. Col. Robert “Buzz” Patterson, a presidential aide and carrier of the “nuclear football,” describes President Clinton’s gross irresponsibility toward national security. Patterson tells how, in the fall of 1998, the watch officer in the White House Situation Room notified the president’s national security adviser, Sandy Berger, that they had located bin Laden and had “a two-hour window to strike.” Here is Patterson’s chilling account: On Sept. 13, 1996, “Pilots were in the cockpits, waiting to launch, targets were identified, everything was in place, all [Berger] needed was the go-ahead.”...

Not for commercial use. Solely to be used for the educational purposes of research and open discussion. Arrest of Kenyan Exposes Massive Global Arms Trade The East African Africa News February 25, 2002 Monday Kenya L AST WEEKEND'S arrest of Kenyan-born Sanjivan Ruprah, who is alleged to be a part of a major arms smuggling operation to Africa, has brought into the open the extent of the multi-million dollar illegal business. The whereabouts of Bout remain unknown. Some media reports say he is in Moscow, while others say he is in the Congo or the United Arab Emirates. An international ...