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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...

DUBAI (Reuters) - An Iraqi Islamist group has said it tried to assassinate Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi this week and that four men died in the attack, Al Jazeera television said on Saturday. The channel said it received a videotape from a group calling itself the Islamic Army of Iraq (news - web sites) in which one of the four men, who later died of his wounds, talks to camera. A group with the same name has said in an internet statement that it was holding two French journalists kidnapped on Aug. 20. Chalabi, now a vocal critic of U.S....

Notwithstanding former President Jimmy Carter's recent statement to the contrary, Undersecretary of State John Bolton's remarks about Cuba's biological weapons capabilities underscore lingering concerns with the rogue island only 90 miles from the United States. Bolton, on May 6, told an audience at the Washington, D.C.-based Heritage Foundation that the U.S. is suspicious about Cuban biomedical laboratories and their ability to transfer biological weapons technology to Iraq, Syria and Libya, all countries that Cuban President Fidel Castro visited last year. Bolton also made remarks, which may be interpreted as a clear signal of hardening State Department policy toward Cuba, faulting...

GEORGETOWN, Guyana (Reuters) -- An Iranian scholar who was abducted in Guyana last month in a case that baffled local police has been found dead with gunshot wounds to the head, police said on Wednesday. The body of Mohammad Hassan Ebrahimi, director of Guyana's International Islamic College for Advanced Studies, was discovered by local people late on Tuesday 45 miles (70 km) south of the capital, Georgetown. Ebrahimi, a well-known member of Guyana's Muslim community, was seized by two gunmen on April 2 in Georgetown as he left the college compound. Police spokesman John Sauers said the partly decomposed body...

WHEN Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician, collected his post from the letterbox on Wednesday he got an unpleasant surprise. Among the bills and junk mail was a letter addressing him as “ugly dog”. It told him he would soon be beheaded. It was an unnerving way to start the day. Only 24 hours earlier Theo van Gogh, the film maker who had often attacked radical Muslims, had been riding along on his bicycle when a Muslim fanatic first shot and then butchered him on a busy street with the nonchalance of an abattoir worker.

In a chilling reminder of the Nazis, a report based on confessions reveals how far the Iraqi regime went to get its enemies. Saddam Hussein established a special assassinations unit that made use of poisons and other James Bond-style weaponry to kill his enemies abroad, according to the report published by the Iraq Survey Group last week. Before the poisons were used in the field they were tested on political prisoners, many of whom died in a macabre series of experiments that ran for two decades until at least 2001. The research, says the US report, was part of a...

French connection armed Saddam By Bill Gertz THE WASHINGTON TIMES The United States stood by for years as supposed allies helped its enemies obtain the world's most dangerous weapons, reveals Bill Gertz, defense and national security reporter for The Washington Times, in the new book "Treachery" (Crown Forum). In this excerpt, he details France's persistence in arming Saddam Hussein. First of three excerpts New intelligence revealing how long France continued to supply and arm Saddam Hussein's regime infuriated U.S. officials as the nation prepared for military action against Iraq. The intelligence reports showing French assistance to Saddam ongoing in the...

Ahmed Chalabi, the Iraqi politician and former US favourite, has said that criminal charges against him in Iraq have been dropped. A judge issued a warrant in August over an alleged counterfeit operation but no action was taken for Mr Chalabi's arrest when he returned to Iraq. Mr Chalabi also announced that murder charges had been dropped against his nephew, Salem, currently out of Iraq. The fact of the charges being dropped could not be immediately confirmed. On Wednesday morning, Ahmed Chalabi survived what seemed to be an assassination attempt when gunmen opened fire on his motorcade. The BBC's Paul...

Gertz to break story in W Times...

ROME Italian investigators are looking into a second ring of suspected terrorists who may have been plotting a chemical weapons assault on Rome. An Algerian, a Pakistani, a Tunisian and three Iraqis were arrested in early morning raids Friday. A group of Moroccans was arrested last month with a map of the U.S. Embassy and large quantities of a cyanide compound that experts say could have been turned into a deadly gas. The ring busted Friday is thought to be completely independent of the Moroccans, officials said, although both likely have ties to Al Qaeda's network of terror. Investigators said ...

BAGHDAD (Reuters) - The Iraqi official heading the investigation into alleged corruption in the United Nations oil-for-food program was killed in a bomb attack earlier this week, officials familiar with the probe said on Saturday. Ihsan Karim, head of the Board of Supreme Audit, died in hospital after a bomb placed under one of the cars in his convoy exploded on Thursday, the officials said. Iraq's former U.S. Governor Paul Bremer gave the board independence from the executive branch of government and appointed Karim as its head in April. The board appointed international accountants Ernst and Young in May to...

Transcripts of secret U.N. Security Council sessions show that U.S. and British diplomats were constantly thwarted by their French, Russian and Chinese counterparts while investigating Saddam Hussein's dirty deals under the oil-for-food program. Minutes of meetings of the so-called 661 Committee — the U.N. Security Council panel that oversaw Iraq sanctions and the oil-for-food program — have been recently turned over to U.S. congressional committees investigating the $10 billion bribery kickback scandal, officials said. According to a top congressional investigator who has read the highly sensitive documents, the minutes confirm that there was widespread knowledge inside the United Nations years...

Man admits threat to Bush By Jeff Zent The Forum - 05/18/2004 A Nevada man pleaded guilty in Fargo's federal court Monday to threatening the life of President Bush. Joshua Aliwishes Banks was three days away from completing a two-year prison sentence at the James River Correctional Center in Jamestown, N.D., when, on Jan. 10, 2003, he became combative with prison guards and threatened to kill President Bush, court records say. The now-32-year-old inmate became angry after guards conducted a random search of his dorm and confiscated a journal in which he wrote about how to become an effective assassin,...

Cheerleaders for TerrorismBy Erick StakelbeckFrontPageMagazine.com | June 17, 2003 Two groups whom Islamic terrorists can count on for sympathy and support are radical lawyers and their counterparts in American law schools. Lynne Stewart is a hero of the National Lawyers Guild and a sought-after campus lecturer. While out on bail under indictment for colluding with a terrorist leader, she has been a sought-after speaker for law school audiences who relish her attacks on Attorney General John Ashcroft as a modern-day fascist and on her country for its imperialist and racist policies. Stewart made national headlines in April 2002 when she...

BAGHDAD, April 4 (Reuters) - The U.S.-led coalition in Iraq confirmed on Sunday it had detained Mustapha Yacoubi, an aide to radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, in connection with the killing of Shi'ite cleric Abdul Majid al-Khoei last year. Yacoubi's detention stoked anti-American protests by Sadr supporters across the country on Sunday. The largest was near Najaf, where at least 24 people were killed when angry Shi'ite protesters clashed with coalition forces and Iraqi police. Khoei was hacked to death at a Najaf mosque in April, 2003 by a mob which also killed one of his aides. Senior clerics at...

From S. Stephen Powell, Covert Cadre: Inside the Institute for Policy Studies, 1987, 65-66: Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate, and CounterspyPhilip Agee and Victor Marchetti, along with members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, launched the journal CounterSpy, under the aegis of the Organizing Committee for a Fifth Estate (OC-5). OC-5 stated that its purpose was to develop an "alternative intelligence community. . .with the flexibility of employing both revolutionary and reformist methods. In an early CounterSpy article, "Exposing the CIA", Agree spelled out the OC-5 program: "The most effective and important systematic efforts to combat the CIA...

KANSAS CITY - (KRT) - Confronted with 32-year-old FBI records, Sen. John Kerry's campaign all but conceded he attended a 1971 Kansas City meeting where a fellow anti-war veteran called for political assassinations. Those active in Vietnam Veterans Against the War at the time stress that the suggestion for such a violent approach was angrily rejected. They say their memories do not include Kerry taking part in the radical discussion. A statement Thursday by Kerry's camp said the Massachusetts Democrat did not recall the meeting, although FBI surveillance material and the group's archives clearly show that Kerry resigned from his...

A Vietnam veteran who plotted to kill members of Congress in 1971 is reportedly ready to accept a position working in the presidential campaign of John Kerry. Leaders of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, including John Kerry, debated a plot to assassinate congressmen in November 1971, according to a report in the New York Sun. The Kerry campaign denies the senator and presidential candidate was present at the meeting, saying he quit the organization prior to the heated session in Kansas City, Nov. 12-15, 1971. However, Randy Barnes of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, disputes that account. Barnes participated in...

The anti-war group that John Kerry was the principal spokesman for debated and voted on a plot to assassinate politicians who supported the Vietnam War. Mr. Kerry denies being present at the November 12-15, 1971, meeting in Kansas City of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and says he quit the group before the meeting. But according to the current head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, Randy Barnes, Mr. Kerry,who was then 27,was at the meeting, voted against the plot, and then orally resigned from the organization. Mr. Barnes was present as part of the Kansas City host chapter for the...

What did Sen. John Kerry know and when did he know it about a plot to assassinate pro-Vietnam war U.S. Senators hatched at a November 1971 Kansas City meeting of the group Vietnam Veterans Against America? According to presidential biographer Douglas Brinkley, that's the question Sen. Kerry needs to answer. If it turns out that the likely Democratic presidential nominee knew of the treasonous plan, Brinkley says he had an obligation to go to the authorities. "The question is: did Kerry quit [VVAW] before Kansas City or did he quit after Kansas City," Brinkley told WABC Radio's Steve Malzberg. "If...