Free Republic

What About Those Chemical Weapons?The Saddam in Rummy's Closet by Jeremy Scahill "Man and the turtle are very much alike. Neither makes any progress without sticking his neck out."Donald Rumsfeld Five years before Saddam Hussein's now infamous 1988 gassing of the Kurds, a key meeting took place in Baghdad that would play a significant role in forging close ties between Saddam Hussein and Washington. It happened at a time when Saddam was first alleged to have used chemical weapons. The meeting in late December 1983 paved the way for an official restoration of relations between Iraq and the US, which...

http://www.arabnews.com/Article.asp?ID=10443300 abandon studies in USBy a Staff WriterJEDDAH, 11 November — About 300 Saudi students have cut short their university studies in the United States and returned home, an official at the Saudi Embassy in Washington said in remarks published yesterday.Some 5,500 Saudi students — 3,500 of them on government scholarships — had been studying at US universities before the Sept. 11 terror attacks, deputy head of the Saudi embassy’s information center, Mahmoud Qattan, told Al-Watan daily. Most faced visa and immigration problems, Qattan said, playing down the effect of harassment and maltreatment of Saudis since the Sept. 11 terror ...

PENTAGON: NEW YORKER STORY FALSE, NO SERIOUS INJURIES DURING DELTA RAID Sun Nov 04 2001 15:13:35 ET Joint Chiefs of Staff General Richard Myers strongly debunked a story filed by the NEW YORKER's Seymour Hersh [set for publication on Monday] which claims U.S. Delta members were seriously injured during a raid Mullah Omar's complex in Afghanistan. MORE Myers made him comments on NBC's MEET THE PRESS to host Tim Russert: RUSSERT: On October 20 there was a commando raid by U.S. forces into Afghanistan. You showed pictures of people being parachuted in and some infrared pictures and things like ...

Green Party USA Coordinator Detained at Airport; Prevented by Armed Military Personnel from Flying to Political Meeting in Chicago CounterPunch Wire Armed government agents grabbed Nancy Oden, Green Party USA coordinating committee member, Thursday at Bangor International Airport in Bangor Maine, as she attempted to board an American Airlines flight to Chicago. "An official told me that my name had been flagged in the computer," a shaken Oden said. "I was targeted because the Green Party USA opposes the bombing of innocent civilians in Afghanistan." Oden, a long-time organic farmer and peace activist in northern Maine, was ordered away from ...

WHOSE LAND IS IT ANYWAY? WHY do so many need the Viagra of violence to demonstrate love for their land? Where was this love when NAFTA and the World Trade Organization were being forced down our throats? Where was it as corporations raped our waters and forests and infected our crops on behalf of their genetically modified ambitions? Where was it when the Clinton administration let its campaign contributors sell supercomputers and other vital technology to China? Where was it when Congress and the President repeatedly performed legislative end runs around the Bill of Rights? Where was it when ...

Blow to US hopes for backing from key border countries Pakistan Fears grow over role of rebels Rory McCarthy in Islamabad Thursday September 27, 2001 The Guardian Cracks were appearing last night in Pakistan's support for the US as doubts mounted over plans to use Afghanistan's opposition forces to overthrow the Taliban regime. Islamabad's concern is that Washington plans to replace the Taliban with leaders drawn from the ethnic minorities in the opposition Northern Alliance. Pakistan regards the alliance as an enemy and ally of India, its long-time rival on the subcontinent. "I think Pakistan would be very upset if ...

Iraq Condemns Kuwaiti provocative acts against Iraqi fishermen Baghdad, Sept.26, INA Iraq calls on the Arab League to intervene with the Kuwaiti government to stop its provocative acts against Iraqi fishermen who fish inside Iraqi territorial water in Basra. In a letter to Arab League Secretary General Amrou Mousa, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri said that four armed Kuwaitis on board a military boat opened fire on a group of Iraqi fishermen while they were fishing in Bobyan region near Khur al-Zubair district and tore their official identification cards on September 15. Mr. Sabri said that the unjustifiable aggression practiced ...

US military talks conclude No action plan discussed: Qureshi Some differences persist; thorny points include whether or not to support Northern Alliance, action against Pakistan-based groups By Shakil Shaikh ISLAMABAD: Pakistan and United States military talks completed here Wednesday "without discussing any operation plan." There was a general consensus on exchange of views, Pakistan's military spokesman Maj Gen Rashid Qureshi told The News. A US military and intelligence team, headed by Brigadier-General Kavin Chilton, arrived in Islamabad last Sunday and held intensive talks on information sharing for consecutive three days. "The Pak-US military talks have completed," said Maj Gen Qureshi. ...

Shame on journalists who insult the dead By Jonathan Foreman, film critic of the New York Post (Filed: 26/09/2001) AS A BRITON living in Manhattan, I was sickened to read articles in the British press that could barely contain their delight at America's "bloody nose", or told the United States that it had brought the destruction on itself.The most contemptible made snide remarks about the victims: a New Statesman leader, for example, even seemed to imply that "American bond traders" somehow deserved to be terrorised. With warped logic, it suggested that these men and women were responsible for "globalisation", ...

MEGA-FLAG FLIES AGAIN By IKIMULISA SOCKWELL-MASON and ANDY GELLER The Stars and Stripes hang proudly in lower Manhattan. As police officers and soldiers saluted and all eyes looked skyward, an American flag the size of a basketball court was draped over a Stuyvesant HS building not far from ground zero yesterday. The Port Authority, which restored the 60-by-90-foot, 400-pound flag, said it is the largest free-flying American flag in the world. From 1981 until it was retired in 1988, the flag waved in the wind on major holidays at the George Washington Bridge. "The Port Authority was really devastated by ...

Young men flee military service against allies FROM CATHERINE PHILP IN QUETTA, PAKISTAN WHEN two student friends turned up in Mohammad’s mountain village last week with shaven heads and no possessions, he knew it was time to get out of Afghanistan. His friends, minority Tajiks like him, had fled from Kabul after Taleban soldiers came to the university and tried to force them into military service against an American attack. Refugees such as Mohammad arriving in Pakistan are bringing reports of Taleban attempts to conscript young men from persecuted minorities to fight in a “holy war”. The Taleban defence minister ...

September 24, 2001 The Kingdom of Corruption The Saudi Connection By Tariq Ali The hijackers responsible for the September 11 outrage were not illiterate, bearded fanatics from the mountain-villages of Afghanistan. They were all educated, highly-skilled, middle-class professionals. Thirteen of the nineteen men involved were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Their names are recognisable. The three Alghamdis are clearly from the Hijaz province of the Kingdom, the site of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Mohamed Atta, born in Egypt, travelled on a Saudi passport. Regardless of whether he gave the order or not, what is indisputable is that the ...

Put Out No Flags My daughter, who goes to Stuyvesant High School only blocks from the World Trade Center, thinks we should fly an American flag out our window. Definitely not, I say: The flag stands for jingoism and vengeance and war. She tells me I'm wrong--the flag means standing together and honoring the dead and saying no to terrorism. In a way we're both right: The Stars and Stripes is the only available symbol right now. In New York City, it decorates taxicabs driven by Indians and Pakistanis, the impromptu memorials of candles and flowers that have sprung up ...

"O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle-be Thou near them! With them, in spirit, we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; ...

It’s at times like these that anyone with an ax to grind or an agenda to advance weighs in with their pet project as the solution to our troubles. Those who have long advocated the crazed use of tactical nuclear weapons do so now. And those who have been waiting for an opportunity to curtail our civil liberties are clamoring for swiftly passed legislation to do just that. So I’ll be up front and disclose that I’ve long thought the money spent on the “War on Drugs” has been a waste of time, energy and resources. With that in mind, ...

"Small Is Beautiful" Attack Bolsters  Nuke Lite Lobby By Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn Make the desert glow for a thousand years. Wipe them off the face of the Earth. Pulverize them. Such is the unrestrained blood lust that masquerades as military punditry these days. The Washington Times has called on the Bush administration the use of nuclear weapons against Afghanistan and Iraq. Absurd? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had the question put to them directly and neither would rule out the use of nuclear bombs as an option. Rumsfeld's deputy, the blood-thirsty, Paul Wolfowitz has warned that the ...

 National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book Edited by Michael L. Evans April 23, 2001 Jump to the documents On Friday, April 20, 2001, a Peruvian Air Force jet, acting on intelligence supplied by a U.S. intelligence plane, shot down a civilian aircraft that was mistakenly suspected of being part of a drug trafficking operation.  An American missionary and her infant daughter were killed in a hail of gunfire, and the Bush administration immediately suspended all U.S. drug interdiction flights over Peru.  The current policy on the sharing of aerial tracking intelligence with Peru and Colombia was formulated in 1994, but ...

------------------------------------------------------------------- Drug Warriors Shot Down Planes Before; Law Exempts U.S. from Blame Jason Vest, AlterNet April 24, 2001 Viewed on April 27, 2001 ------------------------------------------------------------------- Almost immediately after the Peruvian Air Force shot up a Baptist-owned Cessna bearing nothing more intoxicating than missionaries, the United States -- whose Central Intelligence Agency provided Peru with the Cessna's intercept data -- moved quickly to put the bulk of the blame on the Peruvians. But even if it turns out that a CIA-employed aircrew was not as heroic in trying to stop the downing as "intelligence sources" have spun, the point is strangely ...

Missionary plane shot down in Peru: collateral damage in US "drug war" By Bill Vann 24 April 2001 Back to screen version | Send this link by email Following the revelation that a reconnaissance aircraft carrying CIA contract employees participated in the April 20 shoot-down of a plane carrying an American missionary family over the Peruvian Amazon region, Washington has attempted to pin the blame on the Peruvian military. US officials have charged that the Peruvian pilot failed to follow accepted procedures for the interception of suspected drug runners. They have also leaked reports that the American spies objected to ...

CIA tried to stop Peru plane downing-official By Tabassum Zakaria Click to enlarge photo WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A CIA-contracted American crew aboard a U.S. drug interdiction plane did try to stop Peruvian authorities from shooting at a plane that turned out to be carrying American missionaries, a U.S. intelligence official said. "The U.S. crew repeatedly expressed their concern that the nature of the aircraft had not been determined," the official told Reuters on Sunday. "Despite serious concerns raised by the U.S. crew, the shoot-down was authorised by Peruvian authorities," the official said. Three Americans contracted by the Central Intelligence ...