Free Republic

China is adapting commercial car ferries into vessels capable of carrying and launching amphibious assault craft into the water. This will fill a crucial gap in China’s capability to carry out an invasion of Taiwan.The program was turned up by a brilliant piece of open source intelligence by Conor Kennedy, who published his findings at the Jamestown Foundation’s global security website.As Kennedy notes, China’s lack of amphibious assault ships has led some to question whether threats against Taiwan should be taken seriously. He looked instead at China’s fleet of Roll-On, Roll-Off (RO-RO) ships. This type of vessel was originally developed...

"Elements of the U.S. military are clearly aware that much of what the U.S. is doing in Yemen is aiding AQAP and there is much angst about that," said Michael Horton, a fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, a U.S. analysis group that tracks terrorism. "However, supporting the UAE and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia against what the U.S. views as Iranian expansionism takes priority over battling AQAP and even stabilizing Yemen," Horton said.

Watching the members of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) question John Brennan — President Obama’s nominee for CIA director — drove home the utter unwillingness of so many elected and appointed senior federal officials to defend the United States. For the most part, each senator used his/her allotted time to pose irrelevant questions to man whose answers in many cases were deceptive and evasive, when they were not outright lies. One senator hit a bull’s eye when he called Brennan to task for publicly divulging a human operation that had penetrated Al-Qaeda-on-the-Arabian Peninsula but then did not follow...

4 MIN. VIDEO:http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=eD_ybaXhXno

TERRORISM MONITOR Volume 2 Issue 1 (January 15, 2004) A RUSSIAN AGENT AT THE RIGHT HAND OF BIN LADEN? By Evgenii Novikov The Arabic television channel Al Jazeera broadcast an audiotape on December 19, 2003, that was said to be from Dr. Ayman al-Zawahiri, the right hand man of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In it, Zawahiri claimed that his group was chasing Americans everywhere, including in the United States. This claim helped raise the terror threat level. But where is Zawahiri, whose head now carries a price of US$25 million? Recent media reports have said that he is...

The al-Qaeda leader who is thought to have devised the plan for the July 7 suicide bombings in London and an array of terrorist plots against Britain has been captured by the Americans. Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, a former major in Saddam Hussein’s army, was apprehended as he tried to enter Iraq from Iran and was transferred this week to the “high-value detainee programme” at Guantanamo Bay. Abd al-Hadi was taken into CIA custody last year, it emerged from US intelligence sources yesterday, in a move which suggests that he was interrogated for months in a “ghost prison” before being transferred...

THE CHINA OPENING: MOVING AT CROSS PURPOSES by William R. Hawkins The February meeting between President George W. Bush and Chinese President Jiang Zemin in Beijing was cordial, but uneventful. Beijing was clearly not prepared to give an inch on any of the issues which divide the two Asian powers. On key matters--proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, missile defense and Taiwan--the two sides remain at loggerheads. Even benign statements, such as Jiang's "we want the Korean Peninsula to have peace and stability," indicated conflicting views. Beijing supports the survival of the heavily militarized North Korean dictatorship. China supplies North...