Free Republic

WASHINGTON, March 31, 2006 – A coalition military operation on Iraq's Jabouri Peninsula has yielded numerous mortar and artillery rounds, weapons and ammunition, bomb-making materials, and suspected insurgents, military officials reported today. Officials said "Operation Cowpens" was planned and conducted to engage insurgents, deny them resources, and degrade their ability to make and deploy roadside bombs and otherwise engage coalition forces on the peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the Tigris River. Elements of the Fort Carson, Colo.-based 1-8 Combined Arms Battalion, 3rd Heavy Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division, Task Force Band of Brothers, along with 3rd Battalion, 1st...

Recent intelligence information revealing dramatic progress in Iraq's nuclear- weapons program has given a new urgency to U.S. and British efforts to build international support for war with Iraq, according to Iraqi opposition leaders interviewed by Insight in London. The information, from recent defectors and other sources working with the broad-based Iraqi National Congress (INC), indicates that Baghdad has made "a recent breakthrough" in production of the fissile material needed to produce the bomb. It was buttressed on Sept. 24 when the British government released an "unprecedented" white paper based in part on classified intelligence information on Iraq's weapons of...