Free Republic

“What I want to say is that he was never an extremist, neither in his private nor political life. He believed that a modern moderate Islam could work in Afghanistan. He said that the extreme left or right failed in Afghanistan, since both had neglected the needs of the people. Therefore, we could not govern Afghanistan like any traditional Muslim country.” -Ahmad Wali Massoud regarding Ahmed Massoud Shah of the Northern Alliance. In 1996, funded financially and backed morally by their allies in Pakistan, the Taliban (”Students of Islamic Knowledge Movement”) emerged as the prominent force in Afghanistan after the...

Massoud's Letter To The People Of America Date: 1998 A Message to the People of the United States of America I send this message to you today on behalf of the freedom and peace-loving people of Afghanistan, the Mujahedeen freedom fighters who resisted and defeated Soviet communism, the men and women who are still resisting oppression and foreign hegemony and, in the name of more than one and a half million Afghan martyrs who sacrificed their lives to uphold some of the same values and ideals shared by most Americans and Afghans alike. This is a crucial and unique moment...

Operatives linked to Iran tried to kill foreign diplomats, including Israelis and Americans, in at least seven countries over 13 months, the Washington Post reported. New evidence uncovered by investigators in four countries linked the assassination attempts to either Iran-backed Hezbollah militants or operatives based inside Iran, the Post reported Monday, citing U.S. and Middle Eastern security officials. The officials reportedly said that the assassination attempts stopped in early spring, when Iran began to take a softer tone with the West. Shortly after, Iranian officials formally accepted a proposal to resume negotiations with six world powers on proposals to limit...

Army soldiers formed a militia group in Georgia that plotted to overthrow the U.S. government — and they killed a fellow soldier and his girlfriend to keep the plot secret, prosecutors alleged Monday, according to the Associated Press. Prosecutors in the Long County, Ga., case say that the militia group planned to overtake the nearby Fort Stewart, to bomb a dam in Washington state and poison the state’s apple crop and ultimately overthrow the government and assassinate the president, according to reports.

Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, 20, a citizen of Saudi Arabia and resident of Lubbock, Texas, was arrested late yesterday by FBI agents in Texas on a federal charge of attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction in connection with his alleged purchase of chemicals and equipment necessary to make an improvised explosive device (IED) and his research of potential U.S. targets. The arrest and the criminal complaint, which was unsealed in the Northern District of Texas, were announced by David Kris, Assistant Attorney General for National Security; James T. Jacks, U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Texas; and Robert...

Pfc. Naser Jason Abdo, after raising suspicions at a Killeen, Texas, gun shop where he purchased six pounds of gunpowder and several boxes of shotgun shells, was in police custody in Killeen on Thursday, accused of plotting to kill fellow soldiers in a frightening reprise of the November 2009 massacre at Fort Hood. Abdo, 21, who grew up in Garland outside of Dallas, was close to pulling off a "terror plot" in which the intended target was troops based at Fort Hood, said Killeen Police Chief Dennis Baldwin. "We would probably be here today giving you a different briefing had...

WikiLeaks: The sleazy criminal organization dedicated to publishing U.S. secrets may loudly deny its leaks led to the hanging of a man in Iran Tuesday. But that's irrelevant because WikiLeaks gave Tehran the pretext it sought. A 24-year old Iranian man was the latest victim of the mullahs' monstrous tyranny this week, executed as a spy for Israel, supposedly for killing an Iranian nuclear scientist on behalf of his Zionist masters. That's a whiff of the twisted kangaroo court verdicts typical of Iran. In reality, Majid Jamali Fashi was a young kick-boxing instructor who visited Baku, Azerbaijan, for a tournament...

Mohamed al Zawahiri and seven others were cleared of terrorism charges by an Egyptian military court, according to Reuters. Zawahiri is the brother of Al Qaeda's current leader, Ayman al Zawahiri, who acted as Osama bin Laden's right-hand man for years before bin Laden's death. The court overturned an earlier conviction of Zawahiri and the others based on charges of "committing terrorist crimes, harming national security, and planning to overthrow the state," lawyer Mamdouh Ismail told Reuters. The case was 14 years old, and also involved another prominent person, Mohamed al Islambouli, the brother of Khalid al Islambouli, the man...

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced Wednesday that Khalid Al-Jawary, a dangerous Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) terrorist convicted of a 1973 New York City bomb plot and implicated in multiple terrorist attacks spanning two decades, was deported to Sudan. He had served only half of his thirty year sentence. Recently declassified information additionally reveals that Al-Jawary got help from New York's Iraqi diplomatic mission in communicating with his PLO masters. In March of 1973, Al-Jawary and possible accomplices planted three powerful car bombs: two along 5th Avenue near Israeli-owned banks, and one at Kennedy Airport. Timed to explode upon...

I never give time frames, because you never know where you'll have sufficient evidence to go public with a prosecution, " Mueller said.

PESHAWAR: According to a BBCUrdu report, Ilyas Kashmiri, a Pakistani terrorist leader with ties to al Qaeda, was among those killed in the latest drone strikes in South Waziristan. The report quoted locals as saying that Kashmiri was killed in the strike that killed at least nine militants. Kashmiri was the chief of the Harkatul Jihad al-Islami (HJI), an organisation affiliated with al Qaeda. He is widely believed to have masterminded the attack on the PNS Mehran naval base in Karachi. A government official in Peshawar told BBCUrdu that although he had been receiving information regarding the death of Kashmiri...

Missing American Feared a Victim of 'Dirty War' April 13, 2007 The Financial Times Guy Dinmore in Washington and Najmeh Bozorgmehr in Tehran Just why Robert Levinson, a former Federal Bureau of Investigation agent and now private investigator, should venture into Iran to meet a American fugitive wanted for murder in the US remains a mystery that the highest Bush administration authorities are trying to unravel. As the Financial Times revealed this week, Mr Levinson disappeared on March 8 after a six-hour meeting on the Iranian island of Kish with Dawud Salahuddin, an American who converted to Islam and was...

Terrorist sings new tuneBy MICHELE MANDEL, Toronto Sun Last Updated: November 26, 2010 6:59pm BRAMPTON - It’s a strange road from would-be terrorist to would-be rapper. But far better Steven Chand’s bad poetry than his last hobby of training terror recruits in the snow. After pledging to have nothing more to do with terrorism and performing a rather bizarre courtroom rap, Steven Chand was handed a stiff 10 year sentence by Justice Fletcher Dawson Friday for training and fundraising for the Toronto 18 terror group. But with credit for his nearly five years in custody, Chand will have only seven...

Let My People Go  Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt: The Century-Long Struggle for Coptic EqualityBy S. S. HasanOxford University Press. 320 pp. $49.95.Reviewed by Robert W. ShaffernSana Hasan, an Egyptian scholar best known for her Enemy in the Promised Land, has written another important book in Christians versus Muslims in Modern Egypt—a book in which she honestly confronts the sorry condition of Christians in Egypt, where the “problems faced by the Christian minority are for many . . . a taboo subject.” Hasan courageously describes the discrimination and harm often visited upon one of Christianity’s oldest communions—the Coptic...

It took less than 24 hours for the political Left to seize upon the attempted assassination of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and the murder of six people on Saturday to blame the political Right for the shooting. Perhaps the most egregious example came from Paul Krugman of the New York Times, who wrote "We don't have proof yet that this was political, but the odds are that it was." (The newspaper that published plagiarized and fabricated accounts of the "D.C. sniper" by affirmative-action hire Jayson Blair in 2003 is still publishing unsubstantiated suppositions without "proof," eh?) "[Giffords'] father says that ‘the...

BRUSSELS, Belgium Sept. 30 A former pro soccer player who joined the al-Qaida terrorist network was convicted and sentenced to prison Tuesday for plotting to bomb a NATO base believed to contain nuclear weapons. Nizar Trabelsi of Tunisia, who once played professional soccer in Germany, received the maximum sentence of 10 years in prison from a court that also convicted 17 other men and acquitted five others in the largest terrorism trial in Belgium's history. Trabelsi admitted planning to drive a car bomb into the canteen of the Kleine Brogel air base, a Belgian military post used by NATO where...

With five bodies barely cold in Arizona after a madman went on a killing rampage yesterday, hateful liberals are screaming for the death of Sarah Palin. Palin, the Republican Vice Presidential candidate in 2008, has been in the limelight since her rise to nation-wide fame. Angry liberals are now blaming her for assassin Jared Loughner's rampage yesterday, and some are even calling for her death. And no, there was not just one insane person on one insane website, but many cases of wackos calling for the death of Sarah Palin. Like this one from a commenter on TMZ: Or this...

TUSCON, Ariz ( KTLA) -- Jared Lee Loughner, the alleged Tucson gunman, was described Saturday as a politically radical loner. Now an internet trail emerged in which he apparently railed against the US government and told friends: "Please don't be mad at me". There are unconfirmed reports that 22 year old Jared Lee Loughner once met with Rep. Giffords in 2007. A former high school friend said that he had often talked about meeting and talking with the congresswoman. Arizona court records show Loughner has twice been charged with previous offenses. The first, in October 2007, related to the possession...

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...

A Philadelphia man has been charged after allegedly threatening the life of Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking Republican in the House. U.S. Attorney Zane David Memeger said that 38-year-old Norman LaBoon has been charged with two counts of threatening an official of the United States and with transmitting in interstate commerce a threatening communication, according to the The Philadelphia Inquirer. The FBI arrested LaBoon in March after receiving a copy of a YouTube video in which LaBoon made threats about Cantor. Officials tracked the I.P. address to a computer in Philadelphia used by LaBoon, who had previously been arrested for...