Free Republic

Russia - Masque Of The Red Death Vladimir Putin has been hailed perhaps as the pivotal post cold war Russian leader. He has executed a skillful dog and pony show, convincing both the Bush and Blair administrations that the former Soviet Union was not only no longer a military threat to the West but was indeed now becoming a close ally. Obviously Russia's cooperation with the French and German UN delegation's intransigence in dealing with Iraq has done much to throw cold water on this heretofore-budding union. It's important to note that such a relationship offered hope, though ultimately unfounded,...

..frenzy over the Katrina tapes stands in stark contrast to..disinterest of Democrats and the media in the Saddam tapes showing Iraq had WMD and Bush didn't lie....just before Operation Iraqi Freedom both Israeli intelligence and U.S. satellite surveillance detected large amounts of military material moving from Iraq to Syria....not a panicked move...it was a well-planned operation conducted with the assistance of Russia, to which Iraq was $8 billion in debt, much of it for weapons. Russia was worried about what coalition forces might find.According to John Shaw, former deputy undersecretary for international technology security, the WMD were moved out of...

Iraqi intelligence documents, confiscated by U.S. forces and obtained by CNSNews.com , show numerous efforts by Saddam Hussein's regime to work with some of the world's most notorious terror organizations, including al Qaeda, to target Americans. They demonstrate that Saddam's government possessed mustard gas and anthrax, both considered weapons of mass destruction, in the summer of 2000, during the period in which United Nations weapons inspectors were not present in Iraq. And the papers show that Iraq trained dozens of terrorists inside its borders. One of the Iraqi memos contains an order from Saddam for his intelligence service to support...

Iraqi Documents: UNMOVIC Knew Of Renewed WMD Efforts Continuing my review of the many documents released from the DocEx files over the last two days, I found yet another interesting piece of information regarding Saddam Hussein's pursuit of WMD. In a summary of a larger document, the translators found that Iraq had restarted its processing of castor-bean extraction, from which ricin can be developed -- and that UNMOVIC discovered it in December 2002. From CMPC-2003-003766-HT.pdf, with line breaks and emphases mine: Ricin toxin is found in the bean of the castor plant. UNMOVIC inspections since December 2002 have verified that...

I’ve written about this before … but with the release of the WIKILEAKS documents, even Wired magazine acknowledges that US troops found chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. But don’t worry; if you liberals keep telling yourself “Bush Lied”… you’ll get through this. By late 2003, even the Bush White House’s staunchest defenders were starting to give up on the idea that there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. But for years afterward, WikiLeaks’ newly-released Iraq war documents reveal, U.S. troops continued to find chemical weapons labs, encounter insurgent specialists in toxins, and uncover weapons of mass destruction In...

BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, April 30, 2004 4:11 p.m. EDT Joe Says It Was So Remember Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed former ambassador who stirred up a kerfuffle last year by claiming that BUSH LIED!!!! when he purportedly said Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger? Now Wilson has a book out, and it seems he's changing his story. The Washington Post reports: It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade--an overture...

There’s one man, some Republicans say, who kept the public from learning about the chemical shells littered around the Iraqi battlefield. He was Bush's most important political adviser. Starting in 2004, some members of the George W. Bush administration and Republican lawmakers began to find evidence of discarded chemical weapons in Iraq. But when the information was brought up with the White House, senior adviser Karl Rove told them to ‘let these sleeping dogs lie.’ The issue of Iraq’s WMD remnant was suddenly thrust back into the fore this week, with a blockbuster New York Times report accusing the Bush...

Syrian military positions in the province of Hama and Aleppo were targeted Sunday by a series of strikes that caused an explosion reportedly strong enough to trigger an earthquake observed by neighboring countries. Citing an unnamed military source, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported that military positions in villages of Hama and Aleppo were hit by a still unidentified rocket attack at around 10:30 p.m. local time ...

Israeli jets have reportedly targeted a suspected chemical weapons factory in western Syria. The Syrian National Army said four IAF warplanes hit a military site in Hama province, near Masyaf, in the early hours of Thursday morning, killing two soldiers and causing massive damage. It is believed the site was linked to the sarin gas attack in April, which UN investigators said was the work of the Syrian government. The UN confirmed the chemical attacks in Khan Sheikhoun, which resulted in the deaths of dozens of civilians and prompted a US missile attack, were perpetrated by Assad regime forces. Israel...

Gulftainer is a Middle-Eastern based ports management company that operates Delaware’s Port of Wilmington. The Obama administration brought Gulftainer into the United States with its first lease at Florida’s Port Canaveral, bypassing the required CFIUS National Security Threat Analysis. Gulftainer illegally blocked Wawa from its fuel supplies at the tank farm adjacent to the Port of Wilmington. Wawa is a Pennsylvania-based chain of convenience store gas stations with nearly 900 locations on the East Coast of the United States. Gulftainer attempted to extort $1 million in “fees” in exchange for allowing the Wawa tanker trucks to access their own fuel...

A senior Syrian journalist reports Iraq WMD located in three Syrian sites 06 January, 2004 AFP Nizar Nayuf (Nayyouf-Nayyuf), a Syrian journalist who recently defected from Syria to Western Europe and is known for bravely challenging the Syrian regime, said in a letter Monday, January 5, to Dutch newspaper “De Telegraaf,” that he knows the three sites where Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) are kept. The storage places are: click for images of Iraq's WMD location in Syria -1- Tunnels dug under the town of al-Baida near the city of Hama in northern Syria. These tunnels are an integral...

US President Barack Obama continues to receive heavy flak for defending the nuclear deal he initiated with Iran, and then enlisting the support of his allies in the Senate to prevent rival Republican leaders from blocking its implementation. Now, Obama will likely face more criticism after Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner revealed in a speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Monday that a former Obama administration official tried to convince Argentina to provide nuclear fuel to Iran sometime in 2010. In her remarks witnessed by world leaders, Kirchner recalled how Gary Samore, who once worked as the...

Nigergate: The shadow of the French inspector After yesterday’s posting, a close look at Ambassador Wilson, today’s the turn of Mr Jacques Baute. The following article raises some incredible questions and reveals some amazing facts. Mr Baute, a Frenchman, seemed to know all about the the Niger forgeries and kept very quiet about them. The result: the Bush administration was ridiculed. The day after Baute’s organisation, the International Atomic Energy Agency, declared the documents to be forgeries the French Government made a startling announcement..... The Bush administration was decieved by it’s presumed allies and the blame was placed on the...

After the release of the Iraq Survey Group's Duelfer report, the headlines blazed "No WMD Found." ...This reflects the notion that Iraq was only a threat if it had military munitions filled with WMD. The claim "Iraq was not an imminent threat" was also expounded by pundits that seemingly crawled out of the woodwork as well as those opposed to President Bush. But have these individuals read carefully the report...? While no facilities were found producing chemical or biological agents on a large scale, many clandestine laboratories operating under the Iraqi Intelligence Services were found to be engaged in small-scale...

U.S. military forces have discovered a smuggling ring moving copious quantities of explosives and weapons from Iraq to terrorist training camps constructed by the Saddam Hussein regime inside Syria prior to Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF). The Pentagon also announced that the structure bombed by U.S. warplanes last week, described by many major media outlets as a wedding celebration at a private ranching operation, was actually a "dormitory-like" facility used as a "safe house" to facilitate the clandestine movement of foreign terrorists into Iraq from Syria. According to Pentagon officials, small arms, explosives, and bomb making materials are being removed from...

SYDNEY: There is clear evidence Iraq had a biological weapons programme even though none of the armaments have been found there since US-led forces invaded the country, Australian Foreign Minister Alexander Downer said on Thursday. Downer cited a US Central Intelligence Agency report released yesterday, which said two trucks had been discovered in northern Iraq filled with laboratory equipment, as proof that Iraq had such a programme. No prohibited weapons were found in the trucks, but US intelligence officials say the vehicles fit a description from an Iraqi source of a mobile biological weapons laboratory. "The equipment has now been...

Hillary Clinton handing over a sizable portion of US uranium production potential to Russia is not an isolated event, but rather is the logical convergence of decades-old Clinton era dealings with Russia and rogue states, for enrichment of the power elite. AT contributor Michael Curtis is correct when he says that the Uranium One deal has serious implications for our national security.  In fact, the revelation of Hillary’s independent intel network, coupled with Clinton era national security policy changes in the form of counter-proliferation (CP) regimes, have been far more strategically harmful than many Americans realize.... 

The director of a top American spy agency said Tuesday that he believed that material from Iraq's illicit weapons program had been transported into Syria and perhaps other countries as part of an effort by the Iraqis to disperse and destroy evidence immediately before the recent war.The official, James R. Clapper Jr., a retired lieutenant general, said satellite imagery showing a heavy flow of traffic from Iraq into Syria, just before the American invasion in March, led him to believe that illicit weapons material ''unquestionably'' had been moved out of Iraq.''I think people below the Saddam Hussein-and-his-sons level saw what...

<p>His friends call him Abu Amin, 'the father of honesty'. At 43, he is one of Iraq's most highly decorated intelligence officers: a special forces veteran who organised killings behind Iranian lines during the first Gulf war, who then went on to a senior post in the unit known as 'M8' - the department for 'special operations', such as sabotage, terrorism and murder. This is the man, Colonel Muhammed Khalil Ibrahim al-Ani, whom Mohamed Atta flew halfway across the world to meet in Prague last April, five months before piloting his hijacked aircraft into the World Trade Centre.</p>

A top White House national security adviser and key proponent of the Obama administration’s diplomacy with Iran is the focus of a congressional inquiry following disclosures the FBI may have denied him top-level security clearances, according to communications exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. Ben Rhodes, a White House deputy national security adviser who led the administration’s efforts to mislead Congress about the terms of the Iran nuclear agreement, is under scrutiny in the wake of disclosures he was declined interim clearance status by the FBI in 2008, when the administration was moving into the White House. Since that...