Free Republic

A story broke last week that an Arabic journalist named Jamal Khashoggi who was working for the Washington Post had disappeared and was presumed dead. The official story is that Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, on the afternoon of October 2. Immediately (and suspiciously) media stories that appeared to be coordinated appeared, pointing the finger of blame for Khashoggi’s disappearance at Saudi Arabia, in general, and at the country’s Crown Prince, Mohammad Bin Salman, in particular. It was alleged by anonymous sources for several days that Khashoggi had been abducted and then killed at...

Radio host Hugh Hewitt thoroughly embarrassed a Huffington Post reporter and exposed the scribe’s misleading view on Iraq during a brutal on-air interview. Hewitt hosted Zach Carter, the Huffington Post’s senior political economy reporter, on the show to discuss recent comments by former Vice President Dick Cheney. Carter had excoriated Cheney for remarks made about Iraq during a previous interview on Hewitt’s program. The conversation quickly spiraled out of control for Carter when Hewitt dismantled the reporter’s false arguments for why the Bush administration is to blame for the current violence in Iraq. Carter, in the interview, admitted that he...

The FBI has blocked two of its veteran counterterrorism agents from going public with accusations that the CIA deliberately withheld crucial intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. FBI Special Agents Mark Rossini and Douglas Miller have asked for permission to appear in an upcoming public television documentary, scheduled to air in January, on pre-9/11 rivalries between the CIA, FBI and National Security Agency. The program is a spin-off from The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America, by acclaimed investigative reporter James Bamford, due out in a matter of days. The FBI denied Rossini...

On Tuesday I interviewed journalist and author Lawrence Wright, long a contributor to The New Yorker. Wright’s The Looming Tower won the Pulitzer for general non-fiction last week, and its chilling account of the rise of al Qaeda awakens any objective reader to the facts that this worldwide Islamist threat is not the creation of the Bush presidency, and more than retreat from Iraq would stall its growth or limit its appeal. There is no alternative to fighting it wherever it appears, just as there is no alternative to cabining Iran’s ambitions. (The transcript of Tuesday’s interview with Wright is...

The Looming Tower author, Lawrence Wright The Hugh Hewitt Show 9-22-06 at 6:02 PM HH: If you’re driving, you’ll want to pull over. If you’re in your house, you’ll want to sit down. For the next two hours, I’m going to talk with Lawrence Wright, author of The Looming Tower: Al Qaeda And The Road To 9/11, about the nature of al Qaeda, where it came from, where it is going, what it did on 9/11, and what it did before and since. It’s a conversation you really don’t want to miss. The Looming Tower is now on best seller...

September 10, 2006 -- THE LOOMING TOWER: AL QAEDA AND THE ROAD TO 9/11 BY LAWRENCE WRIGHT KNOPF, 469 PAGES, $27.95 IT may seem impious to nominate Lawrence Wright's "The Looming Tower" as the perfect 9/11 book, in the same way you might hail a Michael Crichton novel as the perfect summer thriller. But I don't know of a book that does a better job - indeed, a thrilling job - of illuminating the main human factors that went into producing the horrendous attack of five years ago (minus one day). A staff writer for The New Yorker, Wright has...

Many people believe you couldn't have found a more conservative, religious and docile town in America than Greeley in 1949. There were many churches, and no bars or liquor stores allowed in town. But a six-month stay here in Greeley by an Egyptian student in 1949 made him so angry that he wrote books to express his anti-American diatribe. His name was Sayyid Qutb (SIGH-yid KUH tahb) and he became one of the founders of Islamic terrorism. Television specials, literary magazines, stories in major newspapers, thousands of blogs and now a new book have noted Greeley's influence on the man...