Free Republic

LIKE MANY GREAT SPY STORIES, this one begins with a brief, mundane scene whose significance only becomes apparent later on. Around lunchtime on February 1, 2000, a man dropped a piece of paper near a table in a Middle Eastern restaurant outside Los Angeles and paused long enough to strike up a conversation with two Arabic-speaking men dining nearby. It would take FBI agents nearly 20 years to understand the full meaning of that small event. The man who dropped the piece of paper was Omar al-Bayoumi, a Saudi intelligence asset, recently declassified FBI documents show. And the two Arabic-speaking...

NBC: Terror network seeks material to explode bomb in U.S. WASHINGTON, April 22 — A captured key strategist for the al-Qaida network told interrogators Monday that al-Qaida was working to obtain fissionable material for radiation bombs to be exploded in the United States, NBC News has learned. U.S. officials could not confirm the assertions of the strategist, Abu Zubaydah, but said they were taking him at his word. SOURCES TOLD NBC News that Zubaydah, believed to be one of the top lieutenants of Osama bin Laden, believed to be the mastermind of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United...

Ahmed Ressam was resentenced this morning to 22 years in federal prison for conspiring to bomb the Los Angeles International Airport despite telling a judge that he recanted everything he has told the federal government about terrorist activities. Federal prosecutors had urged U.S. District Judge John Coughenour to send Ressam to prison for life — a sentence Ressam said he would accept now that he had cleared his conscience about his cooperation, which ended in 2003. Prosecutors pointed out that Ressam's defiance has cost two high-profile terrorism prosecutions so far, and that Ressam has actively tried to help the cases...

Nancy Soderberg, a former Ambassador to the United Nations and Foreign Policy Advisor under the Clinton administration, repeated the often-heard myth that President Clinton prevented Millennium attacks on the United States. Soderberg made the debunked claim as a guest on tonight's episode of The O'Reilly Factor (Thursday, February 9, 2006).Soderberg's claim would refer to the arrest of terrorist Ahmed Ressam at the U.S-Canada border on December 14, 1999. It was later learned that Ressam planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on or around New Year's Day 2000. Clinton defenders have often falsely cited this incident as evidence that...