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The US is sending 1,000 Marines in an amphibious assault ship to Libya's coast as a “precautionary” move should the US embassy require evacuation, a US official said. Security concerns also led the US to suggest Americans in Libya "depart immediately." Adding to tensions, gunmen attacked the Tripoli home of Libya’s new prime minister, Ahmed Maiteeq, on Tuesday. Businessman Maiteeq, 42, and his family escaped harm, according to AFP. An aide to Maiteeq said "there was an attack with rockets and small arms on the prime minister's house" in Tripoli at 3:00 a.m. (0100 GMT). Maiteeq’s guards opened fire on...

Suspicion in last week's attack that killed the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three other Americans has focused on members of a hardcore Islamist militia known for its sympathies to al-Qaida, its fierce animosity to the U.S. and its intimidation of other Muslims who don't conform to its harsh ideology. That doesn't mean Libyan authorities will move against Ansar al-Shariah soon. The group is among the most powerful of the many, heavily armed militias that the government relies on to keep security in Benghazi. In fact, it guards one of Benghazi's main hospitals. Libya's militias are a legacy of last...

Iraqi Agent Went To Niger In 1999 July 31, 2003 Terry Jeffrey, the editor of Human Events, reports a great story, "Saddam Sent Trade Mission to Niger." Jeffrey went through the United Nations Atomic Energy Agency records and found that they say Saddam Hussein sent an ambassador named Al Zahawie on a trade mission to Niger in 1999. As Jeffrey asks, "If Iraq’s emissary to Niger sought trade, the implication is obvious: Did Saddam want Niger uranium, or did he want Niger cows or cowpeas?" The Iraqi nuclear hawk did, indeed, go to Niger in 1999. It's backup that the...

October 1, 2003 What the War Revealed By David Quinn In the run-up to the recent Gulf War, I received a letter from a reader of the Irish Catholic, for which I was at that point still editor, declaring that if I kept up my support for the United States’s position with regard to Iraq, I would find myself automatically excommunicated from the Church. I had previously heard of Catholics who supported the war being described as dissidents, but to say that such people could consider themselves excommunicated was to take things to a new level entirely. My reader’s reasoning...

In their zeal to retroactively rebut the argument for the Iraq war, critics of President Bush have tried to discredit a British intelligence report -- cited by the president in his State of the Union address -- that concluded Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa. The most important evidence against the British report is the undisputed conclusion by Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, director general of the United Nations' International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), that documents purporting to show an Iraq-Niger uranium deal were forgeries.What Bush's critics have ignored is that ElBaradei and the IAEA also presented evidence that tends to...