Free Republic

Shortly after Islamists attacked America on 9/11, then-Senator Joe Biden demanded that the United States should send a taxpayer-funded, "no strings attached" gift of $200 million to the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bombshell report has revealed. In the weeks following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Biden reportedly said that "this would be a good time" to hand over a huge chunk of tax dollars to the Iranian regime while America was in mourning.

The American-born Jihadist cleric Anwar Awlaki likely played an important support role in the September 11 attacks nearly ten years ago, according to a new book that examines the threat of home-grown terrorism. The book, “The Next Wave,” by Fox News national security reporter, Catherine Herridge, reveals new documents that find Mr. Awlaki was nearly arrested after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon for providing false information on his passport application. Today Mr. Awlaki is one of the leaders of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Mr. Awlaki is also the only known American citizen on a...

ASHINGTON, June 7— A re-examination of years of terrorist plots and attacks around the world, including the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, suggests that American intelligence agencies profoundly underestimated Al Qaeda's reach and aspirations for more than a decade as it grew from obscurity into a global terrorist threat, lawmakers and investigators said this week.As Congressional investigators look back far beyond the series of signals missed before the Sept. 11 attacks, they are seeking answers to many questions about Al Qaeda that law enforcement and intelligence agencies still cannot answer themselves, officials said.In particular, they said, Congressional investigators are trying...

IN A LITTLE-NOTICED DECISION in a New York courtroom on September 25, 2003, a man described as Osama bin Laden's "best friend" got some good news. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim could not be sentenced to life in prison. Salim--who was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989 and who was for years one of bin Laden's most trusted confidants--had been captured in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States for prosecution related to his role in the grand conspiracy that resulted in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in...

INGAPORE, Jan. 25 — Shortly after the United States began bombing Afghanistan on Oct. 7, a 30-year- old Indonesian traveling on a false Filipino passport slipped into this tightly controlled city-state carrying a plan to strike back at America. His mission, investigators say, was to activate a "sleeper cell" of Islamic militants who had long been waiting for a call from Al Qaeda's leaders in Afghanistan. This group, which had been loosely organized for eight years, began planning to blow up the embassies of the United States, Israel, Australia and Britain, the investigators say. The plot was foiled when 13 ...

KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia (AP) — Malaysia has extended for two more years the imprisonment of a terror suspect linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological weapons, saying he has more information about terrorist operations. Yazid Sufaat, a U.S.-trained biochemist and former Malaysian army captain, was arrested in late 2001 as he returned home from Afghanistan, where officials say he was working on a biological and chemical weapons program for al-Qaeda that was ended by the U.S.-led war. Since then, he has been held without trial under Malaysia's Internal Security Act on accusations of being a member of Jemaah...

Many people have e-mailed asking for my opinion on the emerging Operation Able Danger story--in which army intelligence personnel were barred from notifying the FBI about Mohammed Atta. While I agree that the Pentagon lawyers who stopped the Able Danger operatives from notifying the FBI are culpable, and their behavior is an outrage, my take is different from most conservative commentators. I really don't think the FBI would have acted on the information. Instead, today, we'd be sweeping under the rug yet more ineptitude by the, unfortunately, "lead agency" in the War on Terror. Let's look at what the FBI...

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

SAN DIEGO -- A 34-year-old Saudi national believed to have ties with two of the deceased Sept. 11 hijackers was arrested Thursday in San Diego by agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Hasan Saddiq Faseh Alddin, a legal permanent resident of the United States, was taken into custody on immigration charges, resulting from two prior domestic violence convictions, according to Mike Unzueta, deputy special agent-in-charge for ICE investigations in San Diego.Alddin was picked up near his residence in Vista, according to ICE. The agency said the arrest stemmed from an exhaustive investigation by San Diego's Joint Terrorism Task Force....

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A veil of secrecy will begin to rise Wednesday when a congressional committee reveals some of the information that U.S. spy agencies knew about suspected terrorist activity before the September 11 attacks -- including the disclosure that analysts knew al Qaeda had previously plotted to use aircraft as terrorist weapons. The recently declassified documents will be made public for the first time during an open hearing of the joint House-Senate Intelligence Committee. One of the main questions investigators are probing: Could the September 11 attacks have been prevented? Joint Senate House Intelligence hearings CNN plans coverage of...

(CBS) An Iraqi connection with the Sept. 11 attacks is far from proven, but U.S. officials say they are following several tantalizing leads, reports CBS News National Security Correspondent David Martin. When hijacker Khalid al Midhar arrived in Malaysia in January of 2000 for a meeting of key al Qaeda operatives, he was met at the airport by an Iraqi named Ahmad Shakir, who worked part-time greeting VIPs, a job he got with the help of someone in the Iraqi Embassy. One week later, al Midhar flew to the United States, and 18 months later he was aboard the airliner...