Free Republic

One Coin, Two Sides <>P> By Greg Buete Published 01/03/2003 Deep in South America two terror fronts are colliding. While fundamentally dangerous apart together they are capable of producing terror attacks against the West in both greater magnitude and frequency than ever before. The region is called the Triple Border. It is a lawless region between Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil that supports a community of 30,000 Muslims, many of them radical expatriates of the Lebanese civil war and aligned with Hezbollah. As Jeffery Goldberg of the New Yorker discovered, Hezbollah, an Iranian backed Lebanese terrorist group responsible for over 300...

Inspector recalls would-be hijackerSaudi denied US entry at Fla. airport in 2001 was Al Qaeda fighter By Charlie Savage, Globe Staff, 1/27/2004 WASHINGTON -- Something gave immigration inspector Jose Melendez-Perez "the creeps" when he started to interview the Saudi who had flown from Dubai to Orlando, Fla., via London, on Aug. 4, 2001, the agent testified yesterday before the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. Mohamed al Kahtani's documents appeared to be genuine. A check of his name, birth date, and passport number turned up nothing suspicious. And immigration agents knew from experience to give "deference" to...

Khobar Towers June 23, 2006 The Wall Street Journal Louis J. Freeh Ten years ago this Sunday, acting under direct orders from senior Iranian government leaders, the Saudi Hezbollah detonated a 25,000-pound TNT bomb that killed 19 U.S. airmen in their dormitory at Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. The blast wave destroyed Building 131 and grievously wounded hundreds of additional Air Force personnel. It also killed an unknown number of Saudi civilians in a nearby park. The 19 Americans murdered were members of the 4404th Wing, who were risking their lives to enforce the no-fly zone over southern Iraq....

On January 3, 2020, near Baghdad's airport, a U.S. air raid targeted Qasem Soleimani, commander of Quds Force, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ (“IRGC’s”) terrorist arm. He was killed instantly. To understand how important this is, one needs to understand who Qasem Soleimani (1957-2020) was. Soleimani, a one-time construction worker and weightlifter, joined the IRGC after the 1979 revolution and soon headed one of the IRGC’s main cadres. Khomeini assigned Soleimani to suppress a Kurdish movement in Mahabad, Western Azerbaijan. Soleimani's brutality earned him command over a Quds Guard Corps unit in Kerman. The Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) gave Soleimani opportunities...

Iranian Terrorist Attack Against U.S. Revealed How Bill Clinton concealed it from the public and U.S. intelligence. October 7, 2015 Arnold Ahlert    A bombshell report by the Washington Times reveals that fecklessness in the face of terror isn’t a condition exclusive to the Obama administration. "Bill Clinton’s administration gathered enough evidence to send a top-secret communique accusing Iran of facilitating the deadly 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist bombing,” the Times states, "but suppressed that information from the American public and some elements of U.S. intelligence for fear it would lead to an outcry for reprisal, according to documents and interviews.” Nineteen American...

The 1996 terrorist attack on Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 United States airmen was among the defining events of America’s recent experience in the Middle East. But there has been no judicial accountability. With the reported arrest of the man accused of masterminding the crime, a resolution of the case may be closer. The truck bombing at the eight-story dormitory near the Dharan Air Base was the deadliest such attack on American forces since the 1983 bombing of the Marines’ barracks in Beirut that killed 241 American service members. In 2006, a federal court concluded that elements...

The mastermind of the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack that killed 19 Americans has been captured, U.S. and Saudi officials said on Aug. 26. The arrest of Ahmed al-Mughassil, who was described by the FBI in 2001 as the leader of the armed wing of the Saudi Hizbullah group, was one of the FBI’s most-wanted terrorists. The arrest concluded a nearly two-decade manhunt.

Survivors of a 1996 terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 U.S. servicemen are offendedthat an Iraqi official with ties to Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was welcomed to the White House this week. “Outrage at the visit to the White House really doesn’t describe what I feel,” said William M. Schooley, who survived the June 25, 1996, bombing of the Khobar Towers. “I watched outstanding airmen die that night and witnessed horrific carnage. The survivors of Khobar Towers have been swept under the rug and now have received the greatest insult,” he added. The Washington Times first reported...

The US National Intelligence has removed Iran and the Lebanese resistance movement, Hezbollah, from its list of "terrorist threats." US Director of National Intelligence James Clapper scrapped Iran and Hezbollah from the list in an annual report recently delivered to the US Senate, citing their efforts in fighting terrorists, including the ISIL Takfiri group, Press TV reported. The unclassified version of the report titled “Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Communities,” which was released on February 26, 2015, noted Iran’s efforts to battle extremists, including those of the ISIL terrorist group, who were perceived to constitute the greatest terrorist...

Nearly five years after a powerful truck bomb ripped through a U.S. military housing complex in Saudi Arabia – killing 19 Americans and wounding 372 – terrorism charges have been brought against 13 members of the pro-Iran Saudi Hizballah, or “Party of God.” Another, as yet unidentified, person who is linked to the Lebanese Hizballah has also been charged in the attack. According to the indictment returned today by a Federal Grand Jury in Alexandria, Virginia, nine of the fourteen are charged with 46 separate criminal counts including: conspiracy to kill Americans and employees of the United States, to use...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

Early on the morning of March 16th, 1984, William Buckley left for work at the American embassy in Beirut, Lebanon. Officially, Mr. Buckley, a decorated veteran of the Special Forces, served as the political officer at the embassy. In reality, however, Mr. Buckley was the embassy’s CIA station chief. On his way to the compound, Buckley’s car was stopped by a group of masked men, who forced him from his car at gunpoint. His assailants would later be identified as terrorists from the group Islamic Jihad, which served as an alias for the real perpetrators, Hezbollah. The circumstances surrounding the...