Free Republic

Al-Afari And Away: Ignoring the Saddam-ISIS link by Daniel Clark During two Republican primary debates, presidential frontrunner Donald Trump claimed that Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Islamic terrorism, and argued that he should have been left in power to kill terrorists, so that our soldiers didn't have to. Considering that, one might think a reminder of Saddam's moustache-deep involvement in terrorism, along with the fact that he'd retained an active chemical weapons program between wars, would be a major news story. One might even expect that a story about a former member of Saddam’s regime helping ISIS to...

A former United States Air Force counterintelligence agent was charged with espionage after she defected to Iran and helped it target her former colleagues, the authorities said. In an extraordinarily detailed indictment made public on Wednesday, prosecutors disclosed that Monica Elfriede Witt, 39, gave the Iranians the code name and mission of a secret Pentagon program involving American intelligence operations. According to the indictment, she was working with members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The elite paramilitary group is known to carry out terrorist operations around the globe and has been sanctioned by the American government.

A former CIA analyst pleaded guilty today to retaining and transmitting Top Secret National Defense Information to people who were not entitled to receive it, information which was publicly posted on a social media platform in October 2024.According to court documents, Asif William Rahman, 34, of Vienna, was an employee of the CIA since 2016 and had a Top-Secret security clearance with access to Sensitive Compartmented Information (SCI).“Mr. Rahman betrayed the trust of the American people by unlawfully sharing classified national defense information he swore an oath to protect,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G. Olsen of the Justice Department’s...

Macron told a crowd of reporters and angry people that he would propose a "new political pact" to Lebanon's embattled political class during his visit to a predominantly Christian quarter of the city. An Elysée Palace spokesperson told CNN that Macron said to Lebanese protesters: "I am here and it's my duty to help you, as a whole population, to bring medication and food. "This aid, I guarantee it, won't end up in corrupt hands. I will speak to all political forces to ask for a new pact," Macron said, adding: "I am here today to propose a new political...

Palestinian source says Hamas, Islamic Jihad willing to risk counter-suit should Israel be investigated Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has asked the International Criminal Court to investigate Israel for war crimes allegedly committed during the 50-day war with Hamas and other Gaza terror groups last summer. In the request filed with the Dutch Embassy Thursday morning, Abbas asked the court in The Hague to investigate Israel retroactively for alleged war crimes starting from June 13, 2014 — a day after three Israeli teenagers were kidnapped and murdered by a Hamas cell in the West Bank, an unnamed NGO worker told...

Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez reportedly followed writings and downloaded recordings of infamous al-Qaeda cleric Anwar al-Awlaki. An attorney also revealed on Tuesday that Abdulazeez’s uncle has been in custody in Jordan since a day after the attacks on two military sites. In 2014, Abdulazeez visited Jordan for several months. Al-Khateeb identified his client as Asaad Ibrahim Asaad Haj Ali, the deceased shooter’s maternal uncle. A law enforcement official told NBC news that the uncle is believed to be “radical.”

In the early morning hours of Thursday, Syria’s al-Tala’i military research facility located in Masyaf was reduced to ash and flames. The Jerusalem Post reports that contemporaneous with the strike on al-Tala’I, a Hezbollah weapons convoy in the vicinity was also hit and destroyed. According to Western intelligence sources, al-Tala’i is a center for the production of chemical weapons. Syria blamed Israel and claimed that at least two regime soldiers were killed in the attack. The regime issued a banal and somewhat hypocritical warning of the “dangerous repercussions of this aggressive action to the security and stability of the region.”...

Last week, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein ran a sensationalist story detailing alleged Israeli spy activities in the United States. Stein, citing dubious sources, claimed that Israeli spies attempted to monitor Al Gore’s bathroom activities (an image too frightening to imagine) while drugs and women are routinely employed by Zionist spies to entice U.S. officials into handing over information of value. The sources for these and other absurd allegations contained in the article were mainly anonymous with one notable exception, an obscure ex-intelligence character and former CIA employee named Paul Pillar. One look at Pillar’s past articles, publications and speeches puts the...

Genocidal Islamic Fascist Republic of Iran - threatening annihilation at least since 1991.COLUMN ONE: Hezbollah: The Latin Connection : Bombings in Argentina and Panama prompt concern over the radical group's growing presence in the region. Experts say lax security and porous borders create a prime base for terrorists, by Tracy Wilkinson, Times Staff Writer, Los Angeles Times, August 04, 1994. The embassy's cultural affairs officer, Imam Mohsen Rabbani, rose. "Israel," he intoned in accented Spanish, "must disappear from the face of the Earth." He and a dozen speakers who followed quoted Iran's late Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and called for unity...

(Reuters) - An unmanned aircraft used by U.N. peacekeepers in Democratic Republic of Congo crashed on Wednesday near the eastern town of Goma, sources at the airport and interior ministry said. ... A source at Goma's airport confirmed the incident. A spokesman for the U.N. mission was not available for comment. The Falco drones used by the U.N. force are manufactured by Selex ES, a unit of Italian defence group Finmeccanica. The firm was not immediately available for comment.

Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. Newly released CIA memoranda suggest the tech gurus behind the Alfa Bank hoax also tracked Donald Trump’s movements to devise another collusion conspiracy theory. While smaller in scale than other aspects of Spygate, the Yotaphone hoax represents an equally serious scandal because it involved both the mining of proprietary information and sensitive data from the Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the apparent surveillance of Trump’s physical movements. When Special Counsel John Durham charged former...

Beirut (dpa) - A US-backed alliance of Syrian Kurdish and Arab forces were Saturday closing in on a strategic dam held by Islamic State in northern Syria, a monitoring group said. The Tishreen Dam is located about 22 kilometres from al-Raqqa, Islamic State's de-facto capital in Syria. It is one of three major dams on the Euphrates River that flows from Turkey through Syria and into Iraq, and supplies much of northern Syria with electricity. The Democratic Forces of Syria (DFS), a coalition comprising mainly local Kurds, Arabs and Assyrians, seized the eastern bank of the Euphrates close to Tishreen...

The justices left in place a lower-court decision that allows the transfer of land in central Arizona known as Oak Flat that is sacred to Western Apache Indians.The Supreme Court on Tuesday cleared the way for the federal government to transfer thousands of acres of national forestland containing a Native American sacred site to a copper-mining company. The justices left in place a lower-court decision that allows the transfer of land in central Arizona known as Oak Flat. The land, which has great spiritual value to the Western Apache Indians, sits on the world’s third-largest deposit of copper ore. Justice...

Hunter Biden and his business associates attempted to get Burisma founder Mykola Zlochevsky a U.S. visa shortly after the president’s son became a board member of the Ukrainian energy firm, according to emails reviewed by the Daily Caller. The emails in Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop archive show a coordinated attempt to obtain a visa for Zlochevsky while he was being investigated by Ukrainian authorities for corruption. Biden and some of his associates were potentially “engaging in registrable lobbying activity,” and one email indicates that Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) violations could have been occurring outside of the exchanges, a FARA...

Have you ever noticed what Paul Manafort’s major crime was? After two years of investigation, after the predawn raid in which his wife was held at gunpoint, after months of solitary confinement that have left him a shell of his former self, have you noticed what drew the militant attention of the Obama Justice Department, the FBI, and, ultimately, a special counsel who made him the centerpiece of Russia-gate? According to the indictment Robert Mueller filed against him, Manafort was an unregistered “agent of the Government of Ukraine.” He also functioned as an agent of Viktor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s president from...

Former Ukrainian politician Andriy Portnov, a top adviser to ousted President Viktor Yanukovych (thanks, CIA!), was shot dead this morning outside the American School of Madrid shortly after student drop-off. Spanish media reports that 2-3 suspects are being hunted. Portnov faced treason charges in Ukraine and was accused of collaborating with Russia ... Former president Yanukovych was overthrown in 2014. According to the US Treasury Department, Portnov was "credibly accused of using his influence to buy access and decisions in Ukraine's courts and undermining reform effort." He was sanctioned by the US for corruption and bribery in 2021 under the...

When Uruguay announced last year that it would be taking in five families fleeing Syria's devastating civil war, residents of this small town pulled together and lobbied to host one. Then in November, locals welcomed a newly arrived Merhi Alshebli, his wife and their 15 children with food and seeds to plant vegetables. People in Juan Lacaze, a coastal city of fishermen and paper factory workers in southwestern Uruguay, wanted to do their part to help a country where more than 200,000 have been killed in the fighting.

For more than a decade, the United States has nurtured a secret intelligence partnership with Ukraine that is now critical for both countries in countering Russia... Nestled in a dense forest, the Ukrainian military base appears abandoned and destroyed, its command center a burned-out husk, a casualty of a Russian missile barrage early in the war. But that is above ground. Not far away, a discreet passageway descends to a subterranean bunker where teams of Ukrainian soldiers track Russian spy satellites and eavesdrop on conversations between Russian commanders. On one screen, a red line followed the route of an explosive...

If the Zuma launch goes well, it will mark SpaceX's 17th launch of 2017. If the landing goes off without a hitch, it will be the company's 20th overall successful landing. This includes landings on drone ships at sea as well as on land. Very little is known about the Zuma mission, as no government or commercial entity has claimed it.  Usually, even the National Reconnaissance Office — the branch of the government responsible for maintaining spy satellites — will say when a payload is theirs while keeping the mission details classified. But for some reason, whatever agency is behind...

JOHANNESBURG — Top leaders of South Africa’s governing party ordered President Jacob Zuma to step down on Tuesday, saying that his continued presence was eroding the “renewed hope” felt since the election of new party leaders in December. Ace Magashule, secretary general of the African National Congress, said that the party had not given Mr. Zuma a deadline to respond, but added that he was certain that the president would deliver a reply the next day. “Let’s leave it to President Jacob Zuma,” Mr. Magashule said at a news conference at party headquarters in Johannesburg. In a meeting with party...