Free Republic

Chechnya: Blood, Corruption, Intrigue, And Extremist Islam By Paul M. Weyrich March 19, 2004 Name the Eurasian country where over 2,000 people have been killed or wounded at the hands of terrorists over the last sixteen months. If you named Russia, you picked right. I wonder how many people would have picked wrong. Russia's conflict with Chechnya is "foreign news" to many people in our country. It is viewed as having no real consequence since we haven't sent troops there. Chechnya is a small area. Many Americans hardly know its name, much less could locate it on a map. Many...

A Minnesota truck driver serving life in prison for murdering six northern Wisconsin deer hunters last fall is no longer a suspect in the unsolved slaying of a deer hunter in Clark County four years ago, an investigator said Tuesday. Chai Soua Vang was working as a truck driver in the Twin Cities on the day James Southworth was shot, said Kerry Kirn, a detective with the Clark County Sheriff's Department. Southworth, 37, of Medford, was shot twice in the back near his tree stand on family land near Neillsville on Nov. 23, 2001, during the nine-day deer hunting season....

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

Saddam, the ATM of Al Qaeda By Christopher S. Carson FrontPageMagazine.com | November 15, 2004 The Report of the 9/11 Commission has been digested, and the news media outlets have seized upon it as confirmation of their view that al Qaeda is a kind of purely stateless entity that never had "operational links" with rogue states like Iraq. Somehow, goes the thrust of the Report, Osama bin Laden was for years able to finance, train and supply an international terrorist corporation that had ongoing jihad operations in fifty countries - by himself, on no more than a $30 million personal...

Saddam's Ambassador to al-QaedaBy Jonathan SchanzerWeekly Standard | February 23, 2004 A RECENTLY INTERCEPTED MESSAGE from Iraq-based terrorist Abu Musab al Zarqawi asking the al Qaeda leadership for reinforcements reignited the debate over al-Qaeda ties with Saddam Hussein's fallen Baath regime. William Safire of the New York Times called the message a "smoking gun," while the University of Michigan's Juan Cole says that Safire "offers not even one document to prove" the Saddam/al-Qaeda nexus. What you are about to read bears directly on that debate. It is based on a recent interview with Abdul Rahman al-Shamari, who served in...

ALBAWABA- Unconfirmed reports circulating on social media and in several regional media outlets claim that Ahmad Vahidi, commander-in-chief of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), was killed in recent Israeli airstrikes targeting sites in or around Tehran. On Sunday afternoon, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) carried out an airstrike allegedly on a Hezbollah command centre in the Dahiyeh district of Beirut, following earlier rocket fire launched into northern Israel by Hezbollah. In response, Iran declared that Israel had “crossed all red lines” in Lebanon and launched multiple waves of ballistic missile strikes targeting Israeli territory late on Sunday, June 7...

  Diary of Tube bomb plotter  Ultimate horror ... graphic shows how Barot, inset left, would have collapsed tunnel on train as it went under Thames, inset right, drowning everyone     By SIMON HUGHES and NEIL SYSONNovember 07, 2006CRAZED Dhiren Barot planned to kill thousands of innocent people in Britain and America — with his Thames Tube horror the centrepiece of his plot.The attack formed part of an horrific blitz on the UK that included the Heathrow Express rail link and possibly top London hotels, a court heard yesterday.In a chilling document, the Al-Qaeda commander GLOATED about the prospect...

Alleged Hizballah 'Fighter' Snuck Into U.S. from Mexico Posted Jan 23, 2004 An indictment returned by a federal grand jury on November 19 alleges that a Hizballah "member, fighter, recruiter and fundraiser" snuck across the Mexican border into the United States in 2001, and then conspired here in the U.S. to "provide material support" to Hizballah, which is designated by the State Department as a foreign terrorist organization. The indictment was unsealed January 15. Nabih Ayad, lawyer for the accused man, Mahmoud Kourani, told the Detroit Free Press that the charges against his client were wrong. There is "no shred...

9/11 Panel Questions Two Hijackers' Help Sept. 11 Commission Wonders Why Two Hijackers Got Help From Two Muslim Men When in U.S. The Associated Press WASHINGTON June 27, 2004 — The FBI long has contended that not a single al-Qaida operative in the United States collaborated with the 19 hijackers in the Sept. 11 attacks. Yet the commission investigating the attacks has identified two Muslim men who may have had advance knowledge of the plot. The commission found that two hijackers got substantial help from Mohdar Abdullah and Anwar Aulaqi after settling in California in 2000. The bipartisan panel created...

A New York martial arts expert who is charged with conspiring to help train al Qaeda members is the victim of a "desperate prosecution on the government's behalf," his lawyer said on Tuesday. Tarik Ibn Osman Shah was arrested on Friday in New York after a two-year sting operation in which prosecutors said he had been taped pledging support to Osama bin Laden. He is charged with one count of conspiring to provide material support to al Qaeda, a designated foreign terrorist organization. Shah, who is also a professional jazz musician, was presented briefly in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday...

Organization says mixing immigration and terrorism harms MuslimsTwo anti-Trump organizations filed a lawsuit Monday arguing that a government report earlier this year linking immigrants to most of the country’s terrorism cases since 2001 is so misleading that it violates federal law. The request seeks to recruit federal judges to police the accuracy of the administration, in what — if it’s successful — could become a model for anti-Trump groups to push back on a president they see as having a tenuous connection to the truth. The January report concluded that 73 percent of the 549 people convicted of international terrorism...

Elf Aquitaine, until its privatisation in 1994, was much more than a oil company - according to prosecutors at the trial of Elf's top managers. They claim the state-owned firm worked as an unofficial arm of France's murkiest diplomacy. The close relationship between Elf and French officials is well-documented, and goes back to the presidency of General Charles de Gaulle. As the company expanded into Africa in the 1960s and 1970s, Elf paid secret "commissions" to African officials with the blessing of French governments. By the 1980s Elf had operations in Gabon, Congo Brazzaville, Cameroon, Angola and Nigeria - which,...

Former Dearborn, Michigan, resident Mahmoud Youssef Kourani was a secret Hezbollah agent sent to infiltrate America in February 2001. He stole over the Mexican border into California with a skill set that court records would later describe as “specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, weaponry, spy craft, and counterintelligence,” picked up in Lebanon and Iran. Kourani got caught in 2004 and thrown in federal prison for raising money and recruits for Hezbollah, which pioneered the modern art of suicide truck bombing by blowing up American Marines in Beirut. But the enduring significance of Kourani isn’t that Hezbollah was able to...

DALLAS Prosecutors have produced scores of documents, audio and video tapes, and intercepted phone calls in their attempt to prove that a Muslim charity based in a suburban Dallas office park was actually a fund-raising arm of Middle Eastern terrorists.Much of the evidence has surfaced before in books, newspaper articles and previous trials. But those who track terror-financing say the document haul from the trial of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development has also produced new information.They say the documents shed light on a web of related organizations of militant Palestinian supporters in the United States, some of...

German Trial Hears How Iranian Agent  Warned U.S. of Impending al-Qaida Attack  By Ben Aris  The Guardian  Saturday 24 January 2004  The United States was warned of impending September 11 terrorist attacks by an Iranian spy, but ignored him, German secret service agents testified yesterday in the trial of an alleged al-Qaida terrorist.  The spy, identified as Hamid Reza Zakeri, tried to warn the CIA after leaving Iran in 2001, but was not believed, two German officers who interviewed him told the Hamburg court.  Zakeri worked in the department of the Iranian secret services responsible for "carrying out terrorist attacks globally", one of the officers said. Prosecutors...

Mzoudi was a liaison to al Qaeda, witness said. A man claiming to be a former Iranian spy testified Friday that Abdelghani Mzoudi, the second man to be tried for an alleged role in the Sept. 11 attacks, was involved in the preparations to hit the World Trade Center. The witness, who goes by the alias Hamid Reza Zakeri, took the stand at the Hanseatic Higher Regional Court in Hamburg and claimed that Mzoudi, was "responsible for part of the organization" of the suicide attacks that destroyed the twin towers in New York and damaged the Pentagon. Zakeri testified Mzoudi...

At 6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside Washington's National Zoo and made two calls to pager numbers later traced by federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI). She already had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets and exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals to her DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the ...

The following is a mostly complete set of Associated Press articles, news alerts, bulletins and flashes that ran on the morning of September 11, 2001 - BC-APNewsAlert,0018 NEW YORK -- Plane crashes into World Trade Center, according to television reports. (Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) (New York-AP) -- There's word of a plane crashing into the World Trade Center in New York. (Copyright 2001 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.) AP-Plane Crash-World Trade Center URGENT, take 2 C-N-N quotes a witness as saying that it was a twin-engine plane that flew right into the trade...

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) - Opposition leader and former defense chief Ahmed Shah Massood was injured and his close aide was killed Sunday in an explosion in northern Afghanistan, said Hajji Kahar, an opposition spokesman. Two men from Algeria posing as journalists apparently hid the explosive device in their camera, Kahar told The Associated Press in a satellite telephone interview from Khodja Bahauddin in northern Takhar province, where the explosion occurred. It's not clear whether the two men with the camera were killed. It's believed they were suicide bombers. "There was a lot of noise and smoke," said Kahar. Massood ...

Chinese map collecter has found a copy of an ancient map he claims proves controversial theories that famed Chinese mariner Zheng He was the first person to discover America and circumnavigate the world. Liu Gang said the map supports the recent theories that Chinese discovered America before Christopher Columbus and charted parts of the world such as Antartica and northern Canada long before Western explorers. "The map shows us that Chinese discovered the world 70 years before Columbus," Liu said in a public unveiling of the chart. "The map tells us that Zheng He discovered the world." The map is...