Free Republic

SAUDI 'SOLDIER' BY STEPHEN SCHWARTZ IN Alexandria, Va., on Tuesday, a 23-year-old Northern Virginia man of Saudi Arabian background named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was charged with conspiring to assassinate President Bush. Abu Ali and his accomplices are accused of plotting to kill the president by gunfire or a car bomb. The indictment also spells out such criminal activities as assisting and receiving support from Osama bin Laden's band of murderers. Abu Ali was extradited to Virginia after many months in a Saudi jail. What's most remarkable about this case is the degree to which this would-be assassin is a...

Apt Pupil By Ben JohnsonFrontPageMagazine.com | February 24, 2005This week, the Justice Department accused 23-year-old Virginia native Ahmed Omar Abu Ali of plotting to assassinate President George W. Bush. Media coverage has predictably centered on Abu Ali’s claims of torture while he was held in a Saudi Arabian prison and on the fact that the accused was “his high school’s valedictorian.” Largely omitted from this coverage is the fact that his high school operates under the authority of the Saudi Arabian government, teaches an extremist form of Wahhabi Islam, and has direct ties to at least three other terrorists...

WASHINGTON, Feb. 22 - An American student who was imprisoned in Saudi Arabia for the last 20 months was returned to the United States and accused by the Justice Department on Tuesday of plotting with members of Al Qaeda in 2003 to assassinate President Bush. In an indictment unsealed in federal court in Alexandria, Va., the student, a 23-year-old American citizen named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, is charged with providing material support for terrorism. Mr. Abu Ali is accused of training with Al Qaeda overseas and wanting to "become a planner of terrorist operations" like Mohammed Atta or Khalid Shaikh...

ALEXANDRIA, Va., Feb. 22 (UPI) -- U.S. citizen Ahmed Omar Abu-Ali was charged in federal court Tuesday with plotting to assassinate President Bush with either a gun or a car bomb. Abu-Ali was named in a six-count terrorism indictment in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., upon his return from Saudi Arabia, where he had been held for nearly two years, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported. He was ordered held without bond and a detention hearing was scheduled for Thursday.

Virginia man charged in alleged plot to assassinate Bush By MATTHEW BARAKAT Associated Press Writer ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- A former high school valedictorian in Virginia was charged Tuesday with conspiring to assassinate President Bush and conspiracy to support the al-Qaida terrorist network. Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, 23, a U.S. citizen, made an initial appearance Tuesday in U.S. District Court. He claimed that he was tortured while detained in Saudi Arabia since June of 2003 and offered through his lawyer to show the judge his scars. The indictment said that in 2002 and 2003 Abu Ali and an unidentified coconspirator...

/begin my translation N. Korea: Kim Jong-il Was Shot At By Jang's Son It is alleged that, last November, during a shooting incident by a son of Jang Sung-taek, who is Kim Jong-il's brother-in-law, Kim knocked unconscious. A source who used to be in N. Korean intelligence said on Feb. 14 that this story is making a round among high-level N. Korean security officials. According to this intelligence, between the night of Nov. 28 and the early morning of Nov. 29, there was a family gathering including Kim Jong-il, his second son Kim Jong-chol, Jang Sung-taek's son(Jang is Kim's brother-in-law),...

Chavez says US plans to kill him Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has said he believes the US government is planning to assassinate him. "If they kill me, the name of the person responsible is [President] George Bush," Mr Chavez said. Mr Chavez - who offered no evidence to back his claim - said any attempt on his life would backfire and threatened to cut off oil supplies to America. He was apparently reacting to growing criticism by top US officials of his left-wing government. If, by the hand of the devil, those perverse plans succeed... forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. CARACAS (AFP) - Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez threatened to suspend oil exports to the United States if someone tries to assassinate him, adding that US President George W. Bush would be to blame. "If they kill me, there will be a really guilty party on this planet whose name is the president of the United States, George Bush," Chavez said on his weekly radio program, "Hello, Mr. President." "If, by the hand of the devil, those perverse plans succeed ... forget about Venezuelan oil, Mr. Bush," he said. Chavez said he...

Hugo Chavez shows the United States to want to assassinate it CARACAS - the president vénézuélien Hugo Chavez showed Sunday the president George W Bush to prepare an attack against him, affirming "to be condemned to died" and threatening the United States to suspend oil exports if it were assassinated. "If me am assassinated, there is a large culprit on this planet which is called the president of the United States, George (W.) Bush ", declared the president populist of left in his radio-televised program "Hello, president". "If by the hand of the devil, these perverse plans were crowned...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

Breaking on KDKA radio Pittsburgh...Afghanistan President Karzai's VP pick survives assasination attempt...convoy attacked...in Kabul(?)...no other details..searching Google now...

WASHINGTON - It was a spring-like Monday morning here as Afghan leader Hamid Karzai watched a hastily sewn flag rise over the long-abandoned Afghan embassy. Much like Mr. Karzai's desperate nation, the dilapidated embassy is a testimony to neglect, with peeling paint, leaky roofs, sagging walls, and termites. Still, no one seemed to notice. Speaking of shared US-Afghan pain, partnership, and hope, Karzai dignified the moment. He seemed sincere, yet polished - even, some would say, chic. "Tie it well, Haron," said Karzai, looking on in a silver lamb's-wool cap, flowing tunic, and emerald cape as his chargé d'affairs ...

With the turquoise dome of the shrine to the 18th-century father of the Afghan nation rising in the background, Muhammad Akbar paused, leaned on his pick and said that he had never before been asked to dig a grave in the sacred soil of this compound. The grave was for Azimullah Muhammad, an 18-year-old who a week ago was an unknown seller of plastic water jugs from a dimly lit stall deep inside Kandahar's main bazaar. Now he is Afghanistan's newest hero, to be buried alongside mujahideen heroes of the guerilla war against the Soviet Union. On Friday, television viewers...

VENEZUELA'S President Hugo Chavez, adding to his growing barrage of charges against the United States, accused the George W. Bush administration of plotting his assassination and thanked his Cuban ally Fidel Castro for warning him of about it. "Thank you, Fidel. Really, there are rumors, (but) they are not going to pull it off, my dear friend. I am going to make it to old age like you," Chavez said late Saturday on a visit to Miranda state. Castro had said earlier Saturday that Bush's government likely would be behind a plan to kill the leftist-populist Chavez, whose country is...

America's spy network in Iran was exposed more than 10 years ago and about 50 of its local agents were executed or jailed in a devastating setback for United States intelligence operations in the Islamic state, former CIA officials have disclosed.The Iranian agents, who included senior military officers, had been relaying information to their handlers at the CIA's office in Frankfurt, using messages written in invisible ink on the back of letters posted from Iran. So-called "secret writing" was also used to relay requests and instructions to them from CIA officials in Frankfurt. The spies' letters were posted to a...

The Iraqi Survey Group also found that supposed "humanitarian" imports under Oil-for-Food gave Saddam the ability to restart his biological and chemical warfare programs at a moment's notice. Spertzel said what scared him the most in Iraq was the discovery of secret labs to make deadly weapons like the nerve agent, sarin, and the biological poison, ricin, in spray form. "If that were released in a closed [area], such as Madison Square Garden or, even some, some of your smaller closed malls, shopping malls, it would have a devastating effect … killing hundreds or thousands," Spertzel said. But Spertzel believes...

Car bomb targets moderate Kosovo Serb leader By Branislav KrsticMITROVICA, Serbia and Montenegro, Feb 8 (Reuters) - A bomb exploded on Tuesday under a car used by a moderate Kosovo Serb politician who has recently fallen out with Serb hardliners in the U.N.-run province.No one was hurt in the blast which damaged Oliver Ivanovic's car parked outside his home in the northern Kosovo city of Mitrovica, a United Nations police source told Reuters.The attack in the Serb-dominated north of the city came before mid-year talks planned by the United Nations on whether Kosovo becomes independent -- as demanded by the...

AL-QAEDA MILITANTS' PLANS Al-Qaeda-linked militants who fought four bloody gun battles with Kuwaiti forces over the last month plotted to kidnap and execute US soldiers and westerners, according to a report. Nasser Khlaif al-Enezi, who was killed on January 30, planned to kidnap US soldiers and western civilians. They would then be executed on film, his brother Amer, the alleged leader of the group, told interrogators. The newspaper Al-Qabas said his brother, who was a senior member of the group, received training in such operations while in Iraq fighting against US-led coalition troops. Nasser also received instructions from armed...

Baghdad - Insurgents have killed at least a dozen people in the rebel campaign to frighten Iraqis away from participating in the weekend election. In attacks on designated polling stations and troops around the country yesterday, a score of Iraqis were killed or hurt. One US soldier was killed and five were injured. And as part of an intensifying campaign of intimidation, an al-Qaeda affiliate led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posted a videotape on the Internet showing the murder of a candidate from the party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. The tape included a warning to...

The Hague - A plot to murder Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch lawmaker of Somali origin who is a leading critic of radical Islam, has been uncovered in the course of the investigation into the assassination of film-maker Theo van Gogh, the daily De Telegraaf said on Wednesday. Hirsi Ali co-wrote the script for van Gogh's movie Submission, dealing with the oppression and abuse of women under Islam, that led to his murder on November 2 by a suspected Islamic radical. Under tight police protection, she was reported to be planning a sequel to the movie and writing a book...