Free Republic

When Jihad Came to America by Andrew C. McCarthy On May 2 and 3, 1990, the U.S. embassy in Cairo alerted its counterpart in Khartoum that Egypt’s “leading radical,” Omar Abdel Rahman, was on his way to Sudan. Warning that his ultimate plan might be to seek exile in the United States, the Cairo embassy asked its colleagues to pass along any information they might learn about his activities on Sudanese soil. What did U.S. officials already know about Abdel Rahman in 1990? As the 9/11 Commission would later determine, they knew that he had been arrested repeatedly in Egypt...

Pentagon Makes Fighting Extremism Top Priority Seven years after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Pentagon on Thursday officially named "the long war" against global extremism as its top priority and pledged to avert any conventional military threat from China or Russia through dialogue. The Defense Department, in a new national defense strategy, also emphasized the need to subordinate military operations to "soft power" initiatives to undermine Islamist militancy by promoting economic, political and social development in vulnerable corners of the world. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said he hoped the change would help establish permanent institutional support for counterinsurgency skills...

WNBC News in New York City reports that the NYPD, working with Suffolk Country police and the FBI, have concluded there are no terrorism ties to be concerned about in connection with their discovery that a man, described only as an Egyptian engineer who entered the U.S. on a Sudanese passport, has designed an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of carrying more than 600 pounds of explosives. The engineer was assisted by a small group of men whom investigators surveilled as they drove a white van onto a tarmac, jumped out, and ground-tested the drone. There was no observation of the...