Free Republic

Security fears for Clinton’s arrival Tracey Lawson(tlawson@scotsman.com) BILL CLINTON’s visit to Scotland is at the centre of a security scare amid fears the Arab community is planning to stage a protest against his dealings with Israel. The former US president is due to visit Glasgow next month, where he will be guest speaker at a dinner hosted by the Jewish National Fund. The dinner is being held to help raise £1 million towards a reservoir in Israel which will be named after Mr Clinton. Security for his trip has already been tightened following the 11 September terrorist attacks, after ...

Muslim Madness and the Blame Game Jackie Mason and Raoul Felder 16 November 2001 To hear each side´s version of the current situation between Israel and the Palestinians is like watching Rashoman in Yiddish. In attempting to determine who is right and who is wrong in the situation, people seem to follow either the Jack Webb "Dragnet" approach - "Just the facts, Ma´am." – or the "I Love Lucy" - "Don´t confuse me with the facts" - approach. In life, when in doubt as to which of two roads to take, taking both is usually the best course of ...

The White House has intervened to water down today's planned speech on the Middle East by the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, to prevent any appearance of United States concessions being made to terrorists. President George Bush is believed to have sided with the Pentagon and with the National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, and has blocked Mr Powell from putting too much pressure on Israel to make concessions in the search for peace. As a result, Washington officials said, the long-awaited speech on US policy, which began to be drafted before the September 11 attack and which was to have ...

Friday December 14, 5:17 PM Captured Australian al-Qaeda fighter handed over to US army CANBERRA, Dec 14 (AFP) - Captured Australian al-Qaeda fighter David Hicks will be handed to United States military forces, the government said Friday. "This will ensure that Mr Hicks is held in a safe location and will help facilitate access by Australian authorities seeking to interview him," Defence Minister Robert Hill and Attorney General Daryl Williams said in a joint statement. "The capture of Mr Hicks raises a range of legal questions relating, among other things, to possible offences against Australian law," Hill and Williams added. ...

DOBROSTE, FYROM (AFP) - Government efforts to restore order in the northwest of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM) suffered a setback yesterday when the inhabitants of the mainly ethnic Albanian village of Dobroste refused to allow in a police patrol. The patrol was made up of Slav-Macedonian and ethnic Albanian officers and formed part of the second phase of a plan to reestablish a police presence in villages formerly controlled by ethnic Albanian rebels. But the residents of Dobroste made it clear they were in no hurry to see the law enforcers return. "We don't want the police ...

Thursday December 13 4:00 PM ET U.N. Court Decides to Free Four Bosnian Muslims By Daria Sito-Sucic SARAJEVO (Reuters) - The U.N. war crimes tribunal has decided to release provisionally four senior Bosnian Muslim wartime army officers awaiting trial at The Hague, a spokeswoman for the court's prosecutors said Thursday. Florence Hartmann told Reuters one trial chamber had decided to release three suspects -- Mehmed Alagic, Enver Hadzihasanovic and Amir Kubura -- indicted for crimes against Croats in 1993. Another chamber decided to release former overall commander Sefer Halilovic, indicted separately for crimes against Croats committed in the same year, ...

Friday December 14, 1:36 AM One dead as civilians attack police in Macedonia A civilian was killed when he took part in an armed attack on a Macedonian police patrol that was returning to former conflict areas in northwest Macedonia. "Two or three armed civilians attacked a police patrol" in the village of Ratae, near Tetovo, on Thursday afternoon, a local police official said Thursday. Skopje is seeking to reestablish a police presence in the predominantly Albanian-populated northwest of the country, site of a rebellion earlier this year.

Balkan Express by Nebojsa Malic Antiwar.com December 13, 2001 Where the Shadows Lie 9/11 Didn't Change Imperial Policy in the Balkans "One Land to rule them all, One Land to grind them, One Land to bring them all, and in Democracy bind them… in the land of Balkans, where the Shadows lie." – (with apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien) In the aftermath of September 11, many commentators said that nothing would ever be the same. They were obviously not thinking about the Balkans – though many desperate denizens of the Peninsula hoped otherwise for a while – or the Empire's continuing ...

Thursday December 13 10:39 AM ET Blockades Mar Police Return to Macedonia Rebel Area By Mark Heinrich SKOPJE (Reuters) - Macedonia's peace process took an uncertain step forward on Thursday when police flanked by Western monitors re-entered some rebel villages but retreated from others after militants blocked the roads. Minority Albanian guerrillas seized more than 10 percent of the ex-Yugoslav republic in a shock uprising earlier this year. A plan to reinstate law and order in those areas finally unfolded after almost two months of foot-dragging by the government in enacting civil rights reforms and an amnesty for the guerrillas ...

Thursday, December 13, 2001 Journey to the heart of darkness Before Afghanistan ... Australian David Hicks in the Kosovo Liberation Army in 1999. Photo courtesy: Channel Ten By Penelope Debelle, Mark Metherell and Lyall Johnson The revelation that an Australian adventurer and poultry worker, David Hicks, had trained with the world's most feared terrorists stunned his father and Adelaide's Muslims yesterday. His father described the news that his 26-year-old son, who had been captured in Afghanistan, was possibly involved in Osama bin Laden's terrorist network as "terrible". He said he had known where his son was but did not realise ...

Which Terrorists Are Worse?Al Qaeda? Or the KLA?by Jared Israel[Posted 12 December 2001]=======================================Slobodan Milosevic, the kidnapped former President of Yugoslavia, appeared before The Hague 'Tribunal' yesterday. (1) "Asked how he pleaded to the charges, guilty or not guilty, Mr. Milosevic reacted like his old defiant self and said: 'This miserable text is the ultimate absurdity. I should be given credit for peace in Bosnia, not war.' Responsibility for the Bosnian war, he went on, 'lies with the Western powers that broke up Yugoslavia and their Yugoslav agents.' Because he failed to respond with a plea, the court entered a plea ...

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia (Reuters) - Veteran pacifist Ibrahim Rugova failed to win enough support in Kosovo's new legislature on Thursday to be elected president of the Yugoslav province in a first round of voting. Instead of the two-thirds majority needed, only 49 deputies in the 120-seat assembly backed Rugova, who led passive resistance by Kosovo's ethnic Albanian majority to harsh Serb rule for a decade before war engulfed the province in 1999. The assembly session, which follows on from Monday's inauguration of the vaunted multi-ethnic legislative body set up after a general election last month, ended after the vote and it ...

PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Unknown attackers shot dead the driver and bodyguard of a Kosovo Albanian mayor, a U.N. spokesman in the southern Yugoslav province said on Tuesday. The two were attacked on Monday on their way home after accompanying Fadil Ferati, leader of the municipal assembly in the western town of Istok, to and from the inauguration of Kosovo's new legislature in Pristina. Ferati, a member of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) led by veteran pacifist Ibrahim Rugova, is not a member of the new legislature but attended the session as a guest, U.N. spokesman ...

The story starts: February 24, 1995. Having met the requirements stipulated under North Carolina Law, Greg Dority, #13 is issued a Security Guard and Patrol license. For whatever reason (see Simon Winchester passage), Greg finds himself in Albania, and makes the acquaintance of Shaun Going, who makes the news by being arrested with his cousin and two UNMIK police officers on their way back to Kosovo from Montenegro. Maclean's Magazine, in Canada, does a story on Shaun Going, and Greg Dority is quoted in the article: "Shaun took responsibility and helped his Albanian workers escape," says Greg Dority, head of ...

Taliban Fighter Could Be Tried in US By PETER O'CONNOR .c The Associated Press CANBERRA, Australia (AP) - An Australian man captured in Afghanistan and trained by the al-Qaida network could face murder charges in the United States or penalties in Australia for mercenary work, legal experts said Wednesday. Attorney-General Daryl Williams said the 26-year old man from the southern city of Adelaide was caught last weekend by northern alliance fighters. He is believed to have traveled to Europe in mid-1999 to join the Kosovo Liberation Army fighting in the former Yugoslavia. In November 1999 he went to Pakistan where ...

Filed at 7:14 p.m. ET CANBERRA (Reuters) - An Australian man who trained with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan has been captured by the Northern Alliance, Australian Attorney General Daryl Williams said on Wednesday. Williams said the 26-year-old caucasian male, who also trained with Islamic groups in Kosovo and Pakistan, was arrested by the Northern Alliance on or around December 9. He refused to give any details of the capture, the man's personal details or current whereabouts for security reasons. Williams declined to say if the man was Muslim or whether he had military experience before leaving ...

An Australian man captured in Afghanistan by Northern Alliance troops had undergone extensive training with Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network, Attorney-General Daryl Williams said today. Mr Williams refused to give any personal details of the 26-year-old man, saying his family had to be protected. He said the man had also fought in the former Yugoslavia with the Kosovo Liberation Army before arriving in Afghanistan last year. "On the preliminary advice that we've received he's understood to have travelled to Europe in mid-1999 to join the Kosovo Liberation Army and then travelled to Pakistan in November 1999 where he ...

December 7, 2001 Kosovo's Contradictory Elections by Gary Dempsey Gary Dempsey is a foreign policy analyst at the Cato Institute. After two and a half years of NATO occupation, billions of dollars in foreign aid, and the expulsion of 200,000 Serbs, Gypsies, and other non-Albanians, Kosovo has held its first provincial elections. According to Daan Everts, head of the Kosovo mission of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the elections were a "huge success" and "an important step towards democracy." But were they, really? The Washington Post seems to think so. It claims that "the outcome was a ...

Kosovo mayor's driver and bodyguard shot dead-UN PRISTINA, Yugoslavia, Dec 11 (Reuters) - Unknown attackers shot dead the driver and bodyguard of a Kosovo Albanian mayor, a U.N. spokesman in the southern Yugoslav province said on Tuesday. The two were attacked on Monday on their way home after accompanying Fadil Ferati, leader of the municipal assembly in the western town of Istok, to and from the inauguration of Kosovo's new legislature in Pristina. Ferati, a member of the Democratic League of Kosovo (LDK) led by veteran pacifist Ibrahim Rugova, is not a member of the new legislature but attended the ...

THE HAGUE (Reuters) - Former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic (news - web sites) Tuesday declined to plead to charges at the U.N. war crimes tribunal of genocide against Bosnian Muslims and Croats during the 1992-95 Bosnian war. The court's presiding judge Richard May entered a "not guilty" plea on behalf of Milosevic to 29 counts of genocide, complicity in genocide, crimes against humanity and other war crimes by Serb forces in Bosnia. "I would like to say to you that what we have just heard, this tragic text, is a supreme absurdity. I should be given credit for peace in ...