Free Republic

It seems that every few weeks, we're treated to the findings of a poll showing that the nation might be in trouble when the younger generation takes control. In this instance, an alarming percentage of young adults have a favorable view toward Osama Bin Laden, who masterminded the 9/11 terrorist attacks.The Daily Mail published the results of a survey revealing how various groups of Americans view the terrorist leader, who was killed by U.S. forces in 2011.One in five young Americans has a positive view of 9/11 mastermind and Al Qaeda founder Osama Bin Laden, according to disturbing results of...

In the year of our lord 2020, the headline above doesn’t even qualify as the strangest one I’ve written this week.There are two good arguments for Biden declining to hold any further debates with Trump. There’s the obvious one, that it’s foolish to give your opponent a chance to get back in the race when you’re up big. That’s a time to play it safe and run out the clock, not go into gladiator mode. But the other is less appreciated. As we get closer to Election Day and Trump becomes more desperate for a gamechanger, he’s liable to...

Considering what comes next in Iran is important. So is acknowledging that the president killed a man of pure evil. According to reports confirmed by both the Pentagon and the Iranian government, Major General Qasem Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force within IranÂ’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), was killed in an attack by US Forces on Baghdad airport Friday morning. Soleimani was IranÂ’s top commander and arguably the second-most powerful man within the regime, behind Ayatollah Khamenei. You would suspect that SoleimaniÂ’s death, or the death of any terrorist commander, would be received with cautious optimism. But in the...

The U.S. has received intelligence that suggests Osama bin Laden’s son and potential successor, Hamza, is dead, NBC News reported Wednesday. The three U.S. intelligence officials who spoke with NBC declined to share when, where, or how the younger bin Laden died, and would not say whether the U.S. was at all involved. The news, if confirmed, would dispel fears widely-held in the intelligence community that Hamza bin Laden was poised to succeed his father as the spiritual and tactical leader of al-Qaeda’s global jihadist movement. Born around 1989, Hamza bin Laden traveled with his father to Afghanistan in 1996...

[1]Among the latest six Jihadis freed by Obama from Gitmo as part of his mission is Saad Masir Mukbl al Azani.There are obvious reasons for freeing Saad1. He was identified as a high level Al Qaeda member by other captured terrorists.2. He issued fatwas while allegedly sitting on the fatwa committee with Osama bin Laden’s religious advisor. That may sound non-violent to the religion of peace types, but it meant he was providing the rationale for terrorist attacks.3. He helped indoctrinate Al Qaeda terrorists by teaching them the Koran.I’m sure that being loose he will in no way go...

As soon as legendary journalist Sy Hersh's controversial story on the Osama bin Laden raid was published Sunday night, critics pounced and skeptics ripped his account because of its reliance on anonymous sourcing and its lack of documentary evidence. Now a respected New York Times foreign correspondent, who was based in Afghanistan and Pakistan, writes about a key detail "in Seymour Hersh's Bin Laden story that rings true." Carlotta Gall writes that she also learned from sources that Pakistan's intelligence service, ISI, had kept bin Laden prisoner since 2006 and that the CIA learned about his location from a Pakistani...

Two intelligence sources tell NBC News that the year before the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a "walk in" asset from Pakistani intelligence told the CIA where the most wanted man in the world was hiding - and these two sources plus a third say that the Pakistani government knew where bin Laden was hiding all along. The U.S. government has always characterized the heroic raid by Seal Team Six that killed bin Laden as a unilateral U.S. operation, and has maintained that the CIA found him by tracking couriers to his walled complex in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The...

After Osama Bin Ladin was killed, someone on our side released the name of the doctor who, with DNA tests verified that OBL was in the compound. Who did it and why?

Via the Weekly Standard and Ace. If you’re going to go around claiming “I” got Bin Laden, you should probably at least stick it out until the show’s over, no? No wonder he’s off in the corner in the famous “situation room” photo rather than seated in the big chair. He’d probably just walked in.No, I’m kidding. I don’t think Love’s talking about O being out of the room during the raid itself but rather for a bit during the aftermath. Skip to 6:15 below and watch. He starts off saying what a long day it was, how Obama didn’t...

On August 6, 2011, a military helicopter— Extortion 17— carrying thirty-eight men (including twenty-five of the elite SEAL Team 6, five National Guard and Army Reserve, and eight Afghan commandos) was shot down over Taliban-controlled territory in eastern Afghanistan. They had been on a top secret mission to take out a high-value target. It was the worst loss of life in a single day since the war in Afghanistan began. Per a 1250-page military report, it was simply the result of a “lucky shot” by Taliban soldiers perched on top of a building. Per families of those killed and military...

What if Hollywood made a high profile movie that carried an implicit message supporting George W. Bush's War on Terror policies and made Barack Obama look naïve? What if the movie were made by an acclaimed director, and was really, really good? Why, you'd have the amusing opportunity to read up on the critical reaction To Kathryn Bigelow's new blockbuster film, Zero Dark Thirty. I confess that when I learned that Hollywood was to enjoy very broad cooperation from the intelligence community for the production, I assumed that the Obama Administration would get a free pass, a semi-hagiographic treatment of...

Daily Mail The U.S. Army's Combating Terrorism Center posted an explosive report early this morning that contains what are the last letters Osama bin Laden wrote before the raid that killed him a year ago.  The biggest bombshell is this: He wanted to target planes that Barack Obama and Gen. David Petraeus to promote the "utterly unprepared" Joe Biden to the office of presidency.From the letter bin Laden authored, the mission was of "anticipating and spotting the visits of Obama or Petraeus to Afghanistan or Pakistan to target the aircraft of either one of them." They are not to target...

The cellphone of Osama bin Laden’s trusted courier, which was recovered in the raid that killed both men in Pakistan last month, contained contacts to a militant group that is a longtime asset of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, senior American officials who have been briefed on the findings say. The discovery indicates that Bin Laden used the group, Harakat-ul-Mujahedeen, as part of his support network inside the country, the officials and others said. But it also raised tantalizing questions about whether the group and others like it helped shelter and support Bin Laden on behalf of Pakistan’s spy agency, given that...

~2003~THREAT MATRIX~2011~ LAST 71 SEVENTY 69 68 67 66 65 64 63 62 61 SIXTY 59 58 57 56 55 54 53 52 51 FIFTY 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 FORTY 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31 THIRTY 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 TWENTY 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 TEN 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 ONE MM THE OBAMA SUNDAY SPEECH To start off this new thread, it has been brought to my attention that FReeper, Dengar1, has spotted "suspicious" and...

I have always believed in the power of giving credit where it is due. This rule is tested when the credit may be due to President Obama, and you disagree with almost everything that he has done in office. It is further tested when one notices how stingy President Obama has himself been with the credit due to President Bush's War on Terror policies. However, President Obama deserves great credit for breaking from his liberal roots and taking a risk to kill terrorist mastermind Osama bin Ladin. President Obama is a professorial liberal who neither understands nor likes what America...

ISLAMABAD - Photographs acquired by Reuters and taken about an hour after the U.S. assault on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad in Pakistan show three dead men lying in pools of blood, but no weapons. The photos, taken by a Pakistani security official who entered the compound after the early morning raid on Monday, show two men dressed in traditional Pakistani garb and one in a t-shirt, with blood streaming from their ears, noses and mouths. The official, who wished to remain anonymous, sold the pictures to Reuters. None of the men looked like bin Laden. U.S. President Barack...

The Muslim Brotherhood, a dominant political force in Egypt and around the Arab world, is notorious for saying one thing to Western media and something else to local media. That was the case today, when leading member Essam al-Erian gave Reuters a strong but measured statement on the killing of Osama bin Laden — but left out key details from the group’s reaction on its Arabic-language website. “With Bin Laden’s death, one of the reasons for which violence has been practised in the world has been removed,” Essam al-Erian, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood’s governing body, told Reuters. “It...

Here is a breakdown of the instantly iconic image of Barack Obama and his security team watching the Osama Bin Laden mission unfold. We zoomed in on each of the participants here and named them. The look on each person's face is striking.

The military team that killed Osama Bin Laden is an elite special forces group unofficially called Seal Team 6. Officially, the team's name is classified and not available to the public, technically there is no team 6. A Tier-One counter-terrorism force similar to the Army's elusive Delta group, Team 6's mission rarely make it to paper much less the newspaper. It shows how important the publicity about Bin Laden's killing is to the U.S. that this morning, Team 6 is front pages news. The members of Team 6 are all "black" operatives. They exist outside military protocol, engage in operations...

WASHINGTON - Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the first strands of information that ultimately led to the killing of Osama bin Laden. Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden's most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania. The news is sure to reignite debate over whether the now-closed interrogation and detention program was successful....