Free Republic

Brace yourself. In the United Nations-brokered farce known as the “cessation of hostilities in Lebanon,” we may now be heading for the moment in which Secretary-General Kofi Annan jets to Beirut to crown as the heirs of Lebanon the hijackers of the Cedar Revolution — the terrorists of Hezbollah. Not that the U.N. has exactly expressed it that way. Annan’s office as of Friday afternoon would confirm only that Annan “will likely go to the region in the weeks ahead.” Israeli radio has been reporting that Annan will begin a Middle East tour on Monday in Lebanon, and go from...

Missing Iranian general’s family suspects Israel Family of Ali Reza Asgari, Iran’s former deputy defense minister who disappeared from Turkey last month, visits Turkish embassy in Tehran demanding information on his whereabouts. Asgari’s wife rejects reports he defected to West, smuggled family out of Iran: ‘We are here, those are our enemies lies’ The family of Ali Reza Asgari , the Iranian general and former deputy defense minister who disappeared from Turkey last month, snubbed recent newspaper reports claiming he defected to the West and insisted instead that he was kidnapped by foreign agents. His wife Ziba Asgari, 46, contended...

While helping Iraqi forces to break the Islamic State's siege of Amerli, the US Air Force supported a deadly Shia militia that is responsible for killing hundreds of US soldiers. The Shia militia, known as Asaib al Haq, or the League of the Righteous, has also captured and executed US soldiers and British citizens in the past. Iraqi forces, supported by "paramilitary forces" such as the League of the Righteous, advanced on Amerli late last week and reached the town by Aug. 31, The Washington Post reported. By Sept. 1, the siege, which lasted for more than two months, was...

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- A top special operations officer from Lebanon's Iranian-backed militia Hezbollah has been captured in Iraq, where U.S. officials say he played a key role in a January attack that killed five Americans. Ali Mussa Daqduq, an explosives expert, was captured in March in the southern Iraqi city of Basra, where he was helping train and lead Shiite militias fighting coalition troops, U.S. intelligence officials told CNN. Daqduq pretended to be deaf and mute when captured, and his identity was not known for weeks, the officials said. Once uncovered, however, they said he began to talk, and...

A UNITED State Federal judge ordered the detention on Monday of an Ethiopian-born U.S. citizen who was arrested at Detroit's airport last week for carrying nearly $79,000 in cash and articles on suitcase bombs and the Sept. 11 attacks. Sisayehiticha Dinssa, 34, was arrested on Nov. 14 on arrival in Detroit after a dog smelled narcotics on his cash, according to federal prosecutors who had appealed a decision for him to be released on bond as a threat and a flight risk. Dinssa is charged with failing to declare he was bringing more than $10,000 into the United States, a...

Airport Arrest Turns Up Nuclear Info The Associated Press Thursday, November 16, 2006; 12:54 PM DETROIT -- A man was arrested at Detroit Metropolitan Airport after officials say they found him carrying nearly $79,000 in cash and a laptop computer containing information about nuclear materials and cyanide. Sisayehiticha Dinssa, an unemployed U.S. citizen, was arrested Tuesday after a dog caught the scent of narcotics on cash he was carrying, according to an affidavit filed in court. When agents asked him if he had any cash to declare, he said he had $18,000, authorities said. But when agents checked his luggage,...

A Canadian man accused of plotting a terrorist attack on New York is being held in custody overseas, an FBI source knowledgeable about the investigation said Friday. This suspect is one of eight people — three of them in custody — who, investigators say, were planning to bomb heavily used commuter tunnels leading to Manhattan with the aim of flooding the financial district at the south end of the island. A version of the alleged plot was revealed Friday morning in a New York daily newspaper, prompting the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security to hold...

Assem Hammoud, 31, the architect of a plan to bomb New York tunnels, was trained and directed by Al Qaida to strike by the end of this year, U.S. and Lebanese officials said. "Security forces were able to track e-mails and conversations on an extremist Islamic website used to recruit terrorists," the Lebanese Internal Security Forces said in a statement. Hammoud, nicknamed the "Andalusian prince" in an apparent reference to Islamic emirs who once ruled Spain, was trained in the Palestinian refugee camp of Ein Hilwe near Sidon, the ISF statement said. Ein Hilwe has long been a hotbed of...

UNITED NATIONS - The United States and France reached agreement Saturday on a U.N. Security Council resolution aimed at ending the fighting between Israel and Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas, U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said. Bolton refused to comment on the text, but an official with knowledge of the document said the draft calls for a “full cessation of violence” between Israel and Hezbollah, but would allow Israel the right to launch strikes if Hezbollah attacks it.

JERUSALEM -- In their first comment about the fate of two soldiers whose capture triggered a month long war between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas last summer, Israeli officials said yesterday the two were seriously wounded -- raising the prospect they may no longer be alive.

Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev, the two Israeli soldiers taken hostage by Hizbullah last summer, have been transferred to Iran, London-based Arab language newspaper al-Sharq al-Awsat reported Sunday. According to the report, the captives were transferred to Iran shortly after the kidnapping in a special operation overseen by a senior Revolutionary Guard commander. A source at the headquarters of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei told the newspaper that the planned release of an Iranian prisoner held In Germany could be related to a possible deal regarding the captives. He claimed that as part of this German-Iranian deal, Germany would...

A key conviction tied to the plot to abduct Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer just got tossed by a state appeals court. A three-judge panel on Tuesday vacated the domestic terrorism-related convictions of Joseph Morrison, ruling that jurors in his case were misinstructed and that prosecutors leaned on a misreading of Michigan's antiterrorism law, per the New York Times. Morrison, linked by prosecutors to the Wolverine Watchmen militia and sentenced to four to 20 years behind bars, was found guilty of providing material support for an act of terrorism and illegal gang membership. The court said the state wrongly used kidnapping...

If you thought efforts were over to rewrite history on the lead-up to the war in Iraq and to smear the head of the Iraqi National Congress, Ahmad Chalabi, then think again. A remarkable pair of reports released last week by the Senate Select committee on Intelligence re-examine for the umpteenth time the pre-war intelligence on Iraqi WMD programs and Saddam’s alleged ties to al-Qaeda. The reports were produced at the demand of committee Democrats as part of a vast fishing expedition aimed at buttressing their old saw, Bush lied-People died. What’s remarkable about these reports are not the facts...

BEIRUT: Salam Hassoun is thrilled by the new flat Hizbullah has built for her to replace the one Israeli bombs destroyed during the 2006 summer war. The war ravaged Beirut's southern suburbs, a Hizbullah stronghold that includes the teeming neighborhood of Haret Hreik, where a mammoth Hizbullah-orchestrated reconstruction drive is under way. The deafening explosions of Israeli bombs have been replaced by the grinding cacophony of earth-movers and cement mixers contracted to rebuild 241 of the 282 buildings destroyed in the bombing. The project, dubbed Waad (pledge in Arabic), has won the heart of Hassoun but has also raised a...

LONDON (Reuters) - Indian Ocean islanders expelled by Britain to make way for a U.S. military base on Diego Garcia won the right on Thursday to go home after almost 40 years in exile. Two judges ruled in favour of the Chagos islanders who had fought a protracted legal battle with the British government, which blocked their return to the idyllic archipelago where they had eked out a living fishing and coconut farming. The 2,000 Chagossians were expelled by Britain and dumped hundreds of miles (km) away on the shores of Mauritius and Seychelles. For years they have lived as...

NEW DELHI: How far will a country go to secure a favourable deal for itself? Pretty far, it seems. Mauritius has offered a couple of sun-drenched islands to India as part of a trade and investment deal. While the offer has been talked about for a while, Mauritius has revived it - at a time when it's very keen on persevering with the 1983 double-taxation avoidance treaty with India. Mauritius foreign affairs and trade minister Arvin Boolell said that it was up to India to use the islands to its advantage. He said the "blue economy" had great potential. India...

Earlier today Robert Creamer, the husband of Cong. Jan Schakowsky, (D-IL), was sentenced to five months in prison and 11 months house arrest for his role in a 1990s check-kiting scheme while he was the head of defunct Illinois Public Action Council, a consumer advocacy group. Schakowsky has not been implicated in the scheme. Jan Schakowsky is one of the most liberal members of Congress. She is a member of the far-left Progressive Caucus. Other members of the caucus include such "stars" as Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, Dennis Kucinich, Jim McDermott (Baghdad Jim), Bernie Sanders, and Lynn Woolsey. Schakowsky made...

The world's diplomatic attention is fixed on Pakistan, on ceasefire memoranda, on whether Mojtaba Khamenei will emerge from hiding long enough to initial a document. In that distraction, Israel has done something strategically significant in Lebanon that has received almost no serious analysis (but was highlighted on Arutz Sheva). It has crossed the Litani River. Israeli forces have advanced beyond the Litani, a line that for decades functioned as an unofficial boundary in southern Lebanon. Troops are now pushing northward toward the Zahrani River, roughly ten kilometers away. The IDF has declared the entire area between the two rivers an...

<p>The CIA then failed to comply with the DNI DIG’s oversight investigation, refusing to provide necessary information for investigators to understand why analytical standards at the CIA were violated. The CIA also illegally spied on the computer and phones belonging to DIG personnel, along with their investigations and contact with whistleblowers, Erdman alleges.</p>

https://x.com/PatrickByrne/status/2005713162750791962 Patrick Byrne@PatrickByrne·4hInside the Data Center Plot I Discussed with @EmeraldRobinsonI talked this through with Emerald: allegations link former CIA Director John Brennan (Obama era) to a Serbian Huawei-linked businessman tied to data centers in Belgrade that reportedly hosted Dominion servers. With Huawei’s CCP ties, the claim is that elections could be manipulated remotely—and that a shutdown of this site allegedly disrupted attempts to interfere in 2024.December 29, 2025