Free Republic

Given the extraordinary sudden turnabout in US policy toward Israel under the Obama Administration, I have become obsessed by the repressed 2003 videotape of Rashid Khalidi and Barack Obama. That tape — or so we are told — is ensconced in a safe at the Los Angeles Times building. In the current situation, its release by the paper is more important and newsworthy than ever. The Khalidi tape could be of tremendous significance in revealing the provenance of Obama’s views on the Middle East and the degree to which the public was misled on those views during the presidential campaign....

Iran and Venezuela will launch a joint bank to fund development projects, as ties between two of the fiercest critics of US ”imperialism” continue to strengthen. It is the latest in a string of almost 200 co-operative ventures worth more than $20bn signed since 2001 in an attempt to circumvent international isolation. The bi-national bank, to be based in Tehran, will have an initial capital base of $1.2bn, with each country contributing half of the start-up funds. The foreign ministry in Tehran, which is overseeing the bank, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. Other agreements between OPEC’s biggest...

The American secret service was bugging Princess Diana's telephone conversations without the approval of the British security services on the night she died, according to the most comprehensive report on her death, to be published this week. Among extraordinary details due to emerge in the report by former Metropolitan police commissioner Lord Stevens is the revelation that the US security service was bugging her calls in the hours before she was killed in a car crash in Paris.

President Bush’s policies in the Middle East are “moving the world toward war,” Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Tuesday, maintaining that Iran was a peaceful nation that merely wanted to be left alone to “stand on its [own] feet.” “The U.S. government thinks that it’s still the period after World War II,” Ahmadinejad said in an interview with Brian Williams, anchor and managing editor of “NBC Nightly News,” a mindset that led Bush to believe that he “can rule, therefore, over the rest of the world.” But “the world has changed,” he said. “Nations are awakened now. They want their...

Arrested Pulitzer Prize winning Associated Press photographer Bilal Hussein, who took the infamous pictures of a terrorist execution on Haifa Street in Baghdad, and is notorious in the blogosphere for his collusion with jihadis as they tried to kill Americans, is the subject of a very lengthy attempt by the AP to whitewash his acts: U.S. holds AP photographer in Iraq 5 mos. (Hat tip: Michelle Malkin.) The AP spins furiously and buries it in the middle, but here’s some interesting information from the US Army: The military said Hussein was captured with two insurgents, including Hamid Hamad Motib, an...

Iraq Bomber Kills 17; U.S. Toll at 2,100 By BASSEM MROUE, Associated Press Writer BAGHDAD, Iraq - A suicide car bomber attacked a police patrol Tuesday in the northern city of Kirkuk, killing at least 17 people, and three U.S. soldiers died in two separate attacks, pushing the American death toll in Iraq to 2,100, officials said. In Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, insurgents fired a mortar at a U.S. ceremony attended by top officials to hand over a presidential palace to Iraqi authorities, sending the U.S. ambassador and top commander scrambling for cover but causing no injuries. The attackers...

U.S. May Face Elite Iraqi TroopsMarch 22, 2003 U.S. and British forces besieged the southern city of Basra on Saturday and pounded Baghdad with impunity in the first daylight air raids of the war. But tough fighting loomed for coalition troops as they pressed deeper into Iraq. An soldier from the U.S. Army A Company 3rd Battalion 7th Infantry Regiment watches the blur of a convoy of 3rd Infantry Division forces.  (AP) "The Americans have no conscience. What have our children done to deserve this?"Amal Hassan Kamel,wounded Iraqi civilian Saddam Hussein talks with elite Republican Guard officers in Baghdad. (AP)...