Free Republic

<p>While the White House insists that details of its talks with Enron officials remain secret, a memo outlining those discussions reveals the extent to which the Houston energy giant lobbied to influence government policy.</p> <p>The memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Chronicle, was handed by former Enron Chairman Ken Lay to Vice President Dick Cheney last April when the two met to discuss the administration's response to California's energy crisis.</p>

Five months before hijacking the plane that crashed into the Pentagon, terrorist Nawaf al-Hazmi was ticketed along Interstate 40 in far western Oklahoma. Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper C.L. Parkins pulled al-Hazmi over for speeding and for not wearing a seat belt. Those tickets became clues for the FBI as agents since Sept. 11 have tried to piece together the movements of the 19 terrorists across the country. "I wish I had known more, but that's hindsight," Parkins told The Oklahoman. "I'm just glad I did stop him and did the paper trail on him. That way it could help the ...

On January 17, 2002 KTOK talk radio and KWTV, Channel 9, both news outlets in OKC carried stories about allegations that the former Assistant Deputy Director of the FBI Danny Coulson was in OKC about nine hours prior to the OKC bombing at 9:02 am on April 19, 1995. The allegations about Coulson are significant because at the time he was head of the FBI’s Joint Task force on Counter terrorism in Dallas and had traveled to OK investigating plots of religious groups against the Federal government. This would include the religious compound in OK called Elohim City that ...

<p>The Pentagon is collecting evidence of "linkage" between Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda organization and other international terror groups to bolster its case for attacking Iraq as part of the war on terrorism, Bush administration officials say.</p> <p>The Pentagon set up a secret unit shortly after September 11 to scan years of highly classified intelligence reports to find links between groups supported by Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and bin Laden's al Qaeda network.</p>

TEMPE, Ariz., Jan. 8 /PRNewswire/ -- China will use the current global crisis to launch itself as a new Super-Power and become America's new major enemy, according to Gordon Thomas, an internationally recognized expert on intelligence matters. On September 11, 2001, the same day the World Trade Center and Pentagon were hit by terrorists, a Chinese Peoples Liberation Army transport aircraft from Beijing landed in Kabul with the most important delegation the ruling Taliban had ever received, says Thomas. He describes the ongoing threat from China in his new book, "Seeds of Fire: China and the Story Behind the ...

China's main nuclear weapons center is using U.S. supercomputers illegally to simulate warhead detonations without actual underground tests, The Washington Times has learned. U.S.-origin high-performance computers are being used at the Chinese Academy of Engineering Physics, the main nuclear weapons facility in Beijing. The facility is viewed by officials as China's version of Los Alamos National Laboratory, according to Clinton administration intelligence officials. The use of U.S. supercomputers - with computational speeds of billions of operations per second or faster - at the nuclear facility was outlined in a report classified "top-secret" and circulated among senior U.S. national security officials ...

(December 20) – Measuring the different degrees of fraud Former CIA chief James Woolsey tells Jeff Barak why the next step in the US war on terrorism must be to bring down Saddam Hussein Former CIA chief James Woolsey has no doubt as to what should be the next objective in the war against terror: The destruction of Saddam Hussein. Fighting a global war against ter-rorism without targeting Iraq, he says, "is sort of like Hamlet with-out the prince." Woolsey was here this week for a 13-hour stay in Israel to give the keynote address at the opening of the ...

The current line from Washington is that the anthrax pestilence responsible for killing five people and making millions more anxious about the daily mail may have been home-grown. A White House spokesman says evidence indicates that the anthrax may have originated from a domestic source. But spokesman Ari Fleischer came across as less than convincing. "We're still looking," said Fleischer. "We've all got different feelings about it. We're gathering as much information (as possible)." Though he promised information about the probe would be released at the appropriate time, there is no reason to expect that investigators will be any ...

OKLAHOMA CITY, December 10, 2001 - One Oklahoma senator says he knows "Operation Enduring Freedom" is just the beginning. He says after Afghanistan it's on to Iraq for U.S. forces. The reason: weapons of mass destruction. Weapons that could even hit Oklahoma City. That, the senator says, is why weapons inspectors are no longer there. “The bottom line is this, they kicked us out because they have a lot of stuff they don't want us to know about,” said Sen. Jim Inhofe. “And let me tell ya, we do know -- it's no longer classified -- they have been working ...

<p>November 12, 2001 -- The CIA has evidence that two more hijackers, besides terror leader Mohamed Atta, met with Iraqi intelligence officials earlier this year - bolstering arguments for a Baghdad role in the attacks, it was reported yesterday.</p> <p>The two other skyjackers were Atta's friends and co-conspirators, Marwan al-Shehhi and Ziad Samir Jarrah, who were believed to have been at the controls of two of the pirated jets on Sept. 11.</p>

The Bush administration is asking Congress for a second major expansion of federal surveillance powers that legal experts say would radically change laws that have long protected the rights of Americans. A Justice Department proposal would eliminate the chief legal safeguard in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). A CIA proposal seeks legal authority to gather telephone and Internet records from domestic communication companies. The still-secret proposals would build upon and expand new intelligence-gathering powers that were granted to the FBI and the CIA under the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Signed into law Oct. 26, that anti-terrorism bill laid the foundation ...

The US Attorney General, John Ashcroft, was yesterday reported to be ready to relax restrictions on the FBI's powers to spy on religious and church-based political organisations. His proposal, leaked to the New York Times, would loosen limits on the FBI's surveillance powers, imposed in the 1970s after the death of its founder J. Edgar Hoover. The plan has caused outrage within the FBI itself with agents expected to act upon new surveillance powers describing themselves as 'very, very angry'. The spying, wiretapping and surveillance campaign unleashed by Hoover against church and political groups was called 'Cointelpro', and was ...

<p>What's to all of these claims linking Middle Eastern men to Timothy McVeigh and the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing? I've been a newspaper writer more than 20 years and find the possible connection compelling, even if the federal government hasn't caught on yet. Have I lost it? Am I sun-stroked?</p>

An investigation into an Oklahoma City home invasion robbery has led to the arrest of two admitted Iraqi street gang members, authorities said Thursday. Members of a state anti- terrorism task force raided a south Oklahoma City motel room early Thursday and arrested two men, police Inspector Jerry Flowers said. Flowers is a member of the joint terrorism task force consisting of a number of state law agencies. Shortly after midnight Thursday, officers went to the Travelodge, 820 S MacArthur Blvd., and surrounded room 147. Two men, Ihsan Sala Jabbar, 28, and El Alami "Al" El Mansouri, 30, were arrested. ...

................................... Of the Mideast's predator governments -- Iraq, Iran, Syria and Sudan -- Iraq presents the most urgent problem. Its work on weapons of mass destruction, untrammeled now for three years by U.N. inspections, creates a serious risk for its neighbors and for us. We have plenty of evidence of Iraq's support of terrorists, such as its training of other Arabs at Salman Pak in how to hijack aircraft with knives. We know of many meetings between Iraqi intelligence and various terrorists. And we know for a fact that Saddam tried to assassinate former president George H. W. Bush in ...

The FBI is developing a kind of trojan horse software that they can use to intercept voice-over-net communications. Presently, they can tap phones, and they can capture computer keystrokes, but they can't listen in to voice communications over the net. Enter the "Magic Lantern". It's part of a wider FBI project called "Cyber Knight." Cyber Knight would allow investigators to secretly install over the Internet powerful eavesdropping software that records every keystroke on a person's computer, according to people familiar with the effort. Magic Lantern would let them listen in to voice over data communications. Magic Lantern could be installed ...

<p>The FBI doesn't want to talk about it, but the evidence keeps mounting.</p> <p>Critical evidence that several Middle Eastern men may have been connected to the Oklahoma City bombing appears to have been kept from the public by the FBI.</p>

...... Known as the U.S.A. Patriot Act, the law empowers the government to shift the primary mission of the FBI from solving crimes to gathering domestic intelligence. In addition, the Treasury Department has been charged with building a financial intelligence-gathering system whose data can be accessed by the CIA Most significantly, the CIA will have the authority for the first time to influence FBI surveillance operations inside the United States and to obtain evidence gathered by federal grand juries and criminal wiretaps. ......

<p>While Terry Nichols, already convicted on federal charges in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, returned to court Monday to face the state's case against him, the government was squirming to squelch evidence that Nichols and Timothy McVeigh did not act by themselves.</p>

As parents and children fanned out to walk neighborhoods on Halloween night, a real danger lurks in rail yards in virtually any town or major city accessible to railroad traffic. Parents may be worried about unwanted substances in candy, but what's really scary is what may be parked a couple hundred yards away from their children's public school, according to one courageous whistle blower who had the guts to come forward. Thousands of pressurized rail cars cross U.S. borders daily, and U.S. Customs is doing virtually nothing to inspect them, making each one a handy vehicle for contraband distribution. ...