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WASHINGTON, March 27 (Reuters) - Washington estimates up to 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq enter the country via Syria which has not acted to stop this flow of attackers, the U.S. State Department's Iraq adviser said on Tuesday. David Satterfield, who is Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's key adviser on Iraq, said Syria had an obligation to stop "jihadists" crossing into Iraq where suicide bombings are an almost daily occurrence. He estimated 90 percent of suicide bombers in Iraq were foreigners and while the mix of nationalities changed, some 85 to 90 percent of them crossed over from...

Iranian Revolutionary Guard forces have been spotted by British troops crossing the border into southern Iraq, The Sun tabloid reported on Tuesday. Britain's defence ministry would not confirm or deny the report, with a spokesman declining to comment on "intelligence matters". An unidentified intelligence source told the tabloid: "It is an extremely alarming development and raises the stakes considerably. In effect, it means we are in a full on war with Iran -- but nobody has officially declared it." "We have hard proof that the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps have crossed the border to attack us. It is very hard...

Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon.  In 1982, following Operation Peace for Galilee, JINSA reported on the international terrorist haven that had arisen in Fatahland – the southern part of Lebanon controlled by Yasser Arafat.  Aside from the expected mélange of Middle Easterners, there were Japanese Red Army, German and Italian Red Brigades, Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Salvadorans, Colombians and Peruvians.  There were Iranian Shi’ites, East Germans and Bulgarians.  Before there was Iraq, there was Lebanon, again.  Religious Iran and secular, Ba’athist Syria made a deal to use Syrian-controlled Lebanon as a base for Hizballah to attack Israel.  Today, Israel...

"Rest in peace," Iraqi government spokesperson Bassem al-Awadi said in a eulogy for the former U.S. vice president shared with Newsweek. "Without delving into the intentions behind actions, the change that took place in Iraq under your leadership and that of President Bush in 2003 was profound." "Despite all the events that followed, the transformations Iraq witnessed after the fall of Saddam’s regime were vast and astonishing, though many have tried to distort them to serve their own interests," Awadi said. "The numbers are remarkable, Mr. Dick Cheney, and too many to list here." Iraqis are even more divided on...

Former US Vice President Dick Cheney “just loved Israel,” recalls Michael Oren, past Israeli ambassador to Washington. Oren was in the room as an Israeli reservist in the 1991 Gulf War when Cheney, then defense secretary, and his counterpart Moshe Arens met to discuss the response to Iraqi Scud missile attacks on Israeli cities. He was the Israeli notetaker, as Cheney sought to convince Israel not to respond. “The Israeli government was telling the administration that we couldn’t wait anymore, that the paratroopers were out on the runway ready to go to western Iraq,” says Oren. Cheney feared that the...

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King County prosecutor Norm Maleng says he will seek the death penalty for Conner Schierman who is accused of killing four people in Kirkland last summer. Maleng said he deliberated for ten days after receiving a mitigation packet from Schierman's defense attorneys. The packet included information about Schierman's mental health history. Prosecutors filed the notice to seek the death penalty at a hearing in King County Superior Court this morning. Schierman, 25, is accused of killing his neighbor Olga Milkin; her sister Lyubov Botvina; and Milkin's two small sons, Justin and Andrew, on July 17 and then setting their Kirkland...

Marine's mom arrested at Pelosi's office By FREDERIC J. FROMMER, Associated Press Writer 53 minutes ago The mother of a Marine who tried to kill himself after two tours of duty in Iraq was arrested Monday while protesting the war outside the office of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (news, bio, voting record). Tina Richards of Salem, Ore., was charged with disorderly conduct, said Sgt. Kimberly Schneider, a U.S. Capitol Police spokeswoman. Schneider said Richards would be issued a citation and released. Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Pelosi, D-Calif., said Richards was with a group of 15 to 20 protesters when...

Last week marked the four-year anniversary of America's liberation of Iraq. In response to the longevity of the project, protests were held throughout the nation denouncing the war. From sea to shining sea, the protesters wielded signs with pictures of Che Guevara and anti-American slogans while disingenuously demanding that our troops be brought home immediately. The national coordinator of ANSWER, the coalition to Act Now to Stop War and End Racism, Brian Becker, told me in a phone interview that the protests were held as "an effort to reach the people of this county and as they have become more...

We’ve seen this before, just on a smaller scale. Special Counsel Robert Mueller is following the infamous playbook of Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, who managed to convict an innocent man while the guilty one walked free — and Fitzgerald knew it. They both went after and indicted people who either did not commit any crimes or were indicted for things unrelated to the purposes for which they were appointed. Both were in hotly political environments with supportive media. Both were open-ended investigations. And, it seems, both were hungry for convictions for the sake of convictions — not truth or justice....

White Supremacists and Counter-Demonstrators Rally at Valley Forge Bill Bergstrom /Associated Press Writer VALLEY FORGE, Pa. (AP) - About 100 white supremacists rallied at Valley Forge National Historical Park on Saturday as nearly twice as many opponents heckled them from a nearby hillside. Both groups were outnumbered by federal law enforcement officers. National Park Service spokesman Phil Sheridan said no arrests were made at the rally site, but one person was arrested after a scuffle in a parking lot. Neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members shouted slogans from a stage at the park, where about 11,000 Revolutionary War soldiers commanded...

President Obama on Thursday nominated a former CIA officer and longtime lawyer who examined missteps in U.S. intelligence to be the spy agency’s next inspector general, hoping to fill a position at the watchdog office that’s been vacant for more than a year. If confirmed by the Senate, Shirley Woodward would fill the role left empty since David Buckley stepped down from in January 2015, on the heels of a landmark determination that CIA officials had gained unauthorized access to Senate computer files. Lawmakers called the episode a potential violation of constitutional separation of powers, and the spat led to...

SAN JOSE, Calif. - (KRT) - Kathleen Namphy was dazed and bleeding. Her frightened interpreter called for help, and a group of hikers promised to stay with the 69-year-old retired Stanford lecturer as he ran down the snow-covered Iranian mountain. But when rescuers reached the spot near the summit of Mt. Damavand more than four hours later, Namphy - and the hikers - had vanished. Now hundreds of searchers, aided by Iranian Army helicopters, are scouring the three-mile high mountain near Tehran for any sign of the Palo Alto, Calif., woman. Namphy, a veteran hiker who scaled Mt. Kilimanjaro last...

<p>WASHINGTON - As we prepare to watch President George Bush give his State of the Union address on Tuesday, we think back to Jan. 18 when Saddam's surrogates were in town protesting any use of force against Iraq.</p> <p>In scenes reminiscent of the anti-draft, peace-at-any-price days of Vietnam, some 70,000 demonstrators rallied, marched and orated in Washington and as many again were doing the same in San Francisco. There were smaller efforts in other American cities, along with shows of even greater anti-American enthusiasm surging in some foreign capitals.</p>

An American soldier, a British soldier and one US contractor were killed on Wednesday in a rocket attack on an Iraqi military base hosting foreign troops, a US official told AFP. Hours later, air strikes believed to have been carried out by the US-led coalition targeted Iran-aligned Iraqi fighters in neighboring Syria. On Wednesday evening, a volley of rockets hit the Taji air base north of Baghdad, which hosts troops from the US-led coalition helping local forces battle jihadists. A coalition official first told AFP the force had sustained "several" injuries on Wednesday ranging from "light to critical," but a...

"The dogs bark, the caravan moves on." That Middle Eastern proverb could well describe the events surrounding production of the world's most-hyped dud firecracker, the Iraq Study Group Report. After immense agonies in the mainstream media (MSM), those like myself who predicted the report, once released, would largely be ignored by President George W. Bush, are being proven right and neoconservatives who support a continued commitment to the transformation of Iraq have exhibited renewed influence. Only a couple of lines in the report were worthy of comment. One appears on page 29 of the printed version: "Funding for the Sunni...

Al-Afari And Away: Ignoring the Saddam-ISIS link by Daniel Clark During two Republican primary debates, presidential frontrunner Donald Trump claimed that Saddam Hussein had been an enemy of Islamic terrorism, and argued that he should have been left in power to kill terrorists, so that our soldiers didn't have to. Considering that, one might think a reminder of Saddam's moustache-deep involvement in terrorism, along with the fact that he'd retained an active chemical weapons program between wars, would be a major news story. One might even expect that a story about a former member of Saddam’s regime helping ISIS to...

Toll from Tehran’s terrorism and proxy attacks are a serious factors in Trump’s decision on whether to support or even join the Israeli war effort. Three years after 19 Americans died in a bombing at a Saudi Arabian apartment complex, then-President Bill Clinton sent a cable that told Iran’s president a secret that the 42nd president wasn’t even willing to tell the American public: U.S. intelligence had ample evidence that Tehran was behind the deadly Khobar Towers terror attack. “Message to President Khatami from President Clinton: The United States Government has received credible evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary...

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,...

In May 1988, a prison guard checked Taymour Abdullah Ahmad's name off a list and directed him to a bus idling in the Popular Army camp in Topzawa, southwest of Kirkuk. The camp was one of Iraq's grimmest prisons. During his month-long internment there, the 12-year-old Kurdish boy watched guards beating male prisoners senseless with lengths of coaxial cable. He had seen four children weaken and then die of starvation. He stood helplessly as a guard stripped his father to his undershorts and led him off to his death. So Taymour was not sorry to see the last of Topzawa....