Free Republic

TESTIMONY OF JAMIE S. GORELICKDEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERALCONCERNING ENCRYPTION AND H.R. 3011BEFORE THE HOUSE JUDICIARY COMMITTEESEPTEMBER 25, 1996 Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee, for providing me with this opportunity to discuss with you the Administration's policy on the important and complex issue of encryption and our position on H.R. 3011. Although the Department of Justice opposes H.R. 3011, we look forward to continuing the productive discussions we have had with Congress on this issue. Since 1992, when AT&T announced its plan to sell a small, portable telephone device that would provide users with low-cost but robust voice...

........A high wall, in fact, stands between the Justice Department, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, on the one hand, and the national security agencies on the other. Once arrests are made, the trials of individual perpetrators take bureaucratic precedence over everything else. The Justice Department inherits primary investigatory jurisdiction, and the business of the Justice Department is above all the prosecution and conviction of individual criminals. Once that process is underway, the Justice Department typically denies information to the national security bureaucracies, taking the position that passing on information might "taint the evidence" and affect prospects for obtaining convictions....

MINDANAO, PHILIPPINES - There are so many links between the Abu Sayyaf Group of the Philippines, which beheaded an American hostage a few months ago, and Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda terrorist network, that on paper they look like the route map for a Peshawar-based airline. The links run from that high, bleak border city in Pakistan to terrorist dens in Afghanistan and Yemen; to murders and bombings in the Philippines; to the first attack on the World Trade Center; to a foiled attempt to assassinate the pope during a 1995 visit to Manila. A captured Abu Sayyaf guerrilla, ...

The Enemy Withinby William F. Jasper The terrorist threat comes from a long list of dangerous organizations, many of which may have extensive operations inside the United States. The current U.S. administration has sent American military forces to the other side of the world to capture Osama bin Laden. The real, imminent threat, however, is here at home. The horrendous attacks of September 11th involved only a small number of the Trojan Horse terrorist troops still within our gates. It is this legion of terror that must be rooted out before it can launch even more cataclysmic attacks of death ...

In the global war on terror, law-enforcement officials may need to look in our own backyard for clues about who sent anthrax to Capitol Hill and TV anchormen. Who’s behind the deadly anthrax letters? That is the hot-button question of the moment. While federal law-enforcement officials have come up short in connecting the postal poison to Osama bin Laden, Iraq or any other individual terrorist or state sponsor of terrorism, experts well-versed in terrorism wonder why more attention hasn’t been focused on a connection much closer to home. For example, considerable evidence that may prove helpful in the ongoing investigation ...

Tuesday March 5 9:52 AM ET Authorities Warned of Hijack Risks Photos AP Photo   By JIM GOMEZ and JOHN SOLOMON, U.S. authorities were alerted as early as 1995 that several Middle Eastern pilots were training at American flight schools and at least one had proposed hijacking a plane to crash into federal buildings, according to documents and interviews with Filipino and U.S. authorities. The information came from police interrogations with Abdul Hakim Murad and a computer seized from Ramzi Yousef, two men arrested after an accidental chemical fire at a Manila apartment tipped authorities to a major terrorist plot ...

Did OKC bombers join TWA 800 plot? Posted: April 20, 20041:00 a.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com In light of what we know now we need to look back at a whole bunch of things that happened in the 1990s to see if there might be an al-Qaida connection and that would include the Oklahoma City bombing and the TWA 800 flight. There may be no connection to terrorism, but boy do we need to take a second look at it.– Herbert Meyer, Reagan-era special assistant to CIA director, on "Fox and Friends," April 15, 2004 In this generation, no single reporter has...

As a last question to former FBI head Louis Freeh, 9-11 Commissioner John Lehman asked whether Freeh was familiar with the information Jayna Davis has gathered for her new book, "The Third Terrorist." Davis, a former Oklahoma City newswoman, makes a powerful case that Terry Nichols had conspired with convicted World Trade Center bomber Ramzi Yousef in the Philippines and that Timothy McVeigh had received direct aid in the construction and delivery of the bomb from, among others, likely Iraqi agent, Hussain Al-Hussaini, the alleged John Doe #2. This was an excellent question. Lehman, however, addressed it to the wrong...

Could We Have Prevented the Attacks? by William Norman Grigg During the 1990s, the FBI uncovered clues indicating that bin Laden was planning to attack America with hijacked airliners. This information was never shared with local police. On April 19th, police arrested 30-year-old Leo V. Felton and 21-year-old Erica Chase after they had tried to pass counterfeit $20 bills at a Dunkin’ Donuts in East Boston. After the pair was booked and processed into the Nashua Street Jail, police turned the investigation over to the Secret Service. Seven days later, Felton was free on bail, despite the fact that federal ...

<p>STRANGE CELL-FELLOW: Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the '93 WTC bombing, in 1996, when he began spilling to a jail "friend."</p> <p>April 11, 2004 -- The 9/11 commission has been given an FBI report detailing mobster-turned-spy Gregory Scarpa Jr.'s 1996 prison exchanges with terrorist Ramzi Yousef. The Post's Al Guart reports how a Brooklyn hood became America's unlikely agent in the war on terror.</p>

Military retaliation from Baghdad was the main administration concern following Saturday's strike on Iraq. Yet U.S. officials should start thinking seriously about the question of retaliation through terror. It is quite possible, for example, that there was a connection between Saddam and recent attempts to blow up Manhattan. It is quite possible that New York's terror is Saddam's revenge. Speculation about the responsibility for last week's bombing plot and the earlier World Trade Center bombing has focused on Iran, Sudan, and the fundamentalist Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman. Much energy has been spent linking the terror to Islamic fundamentalism. Yet Saddam,...

<p>LONDON — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's purported operations chief, has told U.S. interrogators that the group had been planning attacks on the Library Tower in Los Angeles and the Sears Tower in Chicago on the heels of the September 11, 2001, terror strikes.</p>

'I met Osama Bin Laden in Kabul. It was at this time we discussed the Heathrow operation' It makes a chilling picture. The mastermind behind the September 11 attacks has told interrogators that he and his terrorist nephew leafed through almanacs of American skyscrapers when planning the operation. Sears Tower in Chicago and Library Tower in Los Angeles — which was “blown up” in the film Independence Day — were both potential targets, according to transcripts of interrogations of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Al-Qaeda operations chief. “We were looking for symbols of economic might,” he told his captors. He recounted...

The always fascinating Dan Drezner has a bunch of good posts up.. sorry, we are going to skip to the red meat: On Page 127 [of his new "Against All Enemies"], Clarke notes that it's possible that al-Qaida operatives in the Philippines "taught Terry Nichols how to blow up the Oklahoma Federal Building." Intelligence places Nichols there on the same days as Ramzi Yousef, and "we do know that Nichols's bombs did not work before his Philippines stay and were deadly when he returned." This ties in to the theory that Clinton quashed investigations into a foreign connection to Terry...

Saddam Hussein supplied financial support, training and shelter for an array of deadly terrorist organizations right up until the onset of the Iraq war a year ago, including such notorious groups as Hamas, Ansar al-Islam, the Palestinian Liberation Front, the Abu Nidal Organization and the Arab Liberation Front, according to a comprehensive report released by the Hudson Institute. Titled "Saddam's Philanthropy of Terror," the report details the role played by terrorists supported by Saddam's regime in an array of infamous acts that killed hundreds American citizens both inside and outside the U.S. before and after the Sept. 11 attacks -...

Did Nichols and Yousef meet? Closer analysis of Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef timelines creates a compelling, if still circumstantial, case — and offers clues to where the smoking guns may be found By J.M. BERGER INTELWIRE.com In November 1994, Terry Nichols and Ramzi Yousef both walked on the grounds of the same college campus in the Philippines. Whether their paths crossed is a question that still dogs researchers. But it's increasingly clear that what separates their respective itineraries is sometimes a matter of yards, feet or even inches, within a span of days, hours and sometimes mere minutes. They...

THE WORLD TRADE CENTER BOMB Who is Ramzi Yousef? And Why It Matters The National Interest by Laurie Mylroie 1995/96 NOTE: Laurie Mylroie, formerly of Harvard University and the U.S. Naval War College, is currently with the Foreign Policy Research Institute of Philadelphia. She was co-author of the bestseller, Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf (Random House 1990), and has just completed a sequel, 'Study of Revenge': Saddam's Terror Against America. . ACCORDING TO THE presiding judge in last year's trial, the bombing of New York's World Trade Center on February 26, 1993 was meant to topple the ...

A NEWSWEEK article by investigative reporters Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball about the memo linking Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein dismisses a recent WEEKLY STANDARD report as "hype" and concludes, the "tangled tale of the memo suggests that the case of whether there has been Iraqi-al Qaeda complicity is far from closed." While it's refreshing to see the establishment media pick up the story, the Newsweek article is less than authoritative. The authors write: "The Pentagon memo pointedly omits any reference to the interrogations of a host of other high-level al Qaeda and Iraqi detainees--including such notables as Khalid...

The Memo and the Link Between Saddam and OsamaBy Lowell PonteFrontPageMagazine.com | November 17, 2003 "OSAMA BIN LADEN AND SADDAM HUSSEIN had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003,” reports the November 24 issue of The Weekly Standard, “that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda – perhaps even for Mohamed Atta – according to a top secret U.S. Government memorandum….” This 16-page memo, dated last October 27, was sent from Undersecretary of Defense...

Just days after the Oklahoma City bombing, the INS deported Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law Mohammed Jamal Khalifa, even though the FBI had evidence that linked the Saudi businessman to the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1995 Bojinka plot and Oklahoma City. Not only was Khalifa deported to Jordan, where he was subsequently freed, but the U.S. government let him leave with potentially incriminating evidence and cleared his record of terrorism charges. Evidence in the FBI's possession at the time potentially implicated the Saudi businessman in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the airliner bombing plot and the Oklahoma City...