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The United States should conduct military strikes against Hezbollah and Hamas facilities in the Middle East before engaging in any military action against Iraq, the leaders of an influential US Senate committee demanded Sunday. Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Bob Graham and his Republican counterpart, Richard Shelby, made their recommendation amid increasing concern among member of the US intelligence community that if faced with certain downfall, Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein could hand over weapons of mass destruction to regional terrorist groups. "Against those international terrorists such as Hezbollah and Hamas, we need to be launching attacks on their headquarters and...

UNSCOM Document defines Iraq's Extensive Biological Weapons Program. Iraq began making anthrax in 1985 and was known to continue until 1991. It achieved weaponized anthrax capabilities. Excerpts of document follow. (x) In summary, Iraq has declared the production of at least 19,000 litres of concentrated botulinum toxin (nearly 10,000 litres were filled into munitions), 8,500 litres of concentrated anthrax (some 6,500 litres were filled into munitions) and 2,200 litres of concentrated aflatoxin (1,580 litres were filled into munitions); 76. Iraq's biological weapons programme as described to the Commission embraced a comprehensive range of agents and munitions. Agents under Iraq's biological...

March 7, 2006 Expect Journalistic Tongues to Loosen By Jack Kelly Journalists will be paying rapt attention when Steven Rosen and Keith Weissman go on trial next month for violation of the Espionage Act of 1917. Mr. Rosen and Mr. Weissman were officials of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee. They received classified information from Lawrence Franklin, an analyst at the Department of Defense, which they passed on to an Israeli diplomat, and to journalists. They are the first private citizens ever to be prosecuted under the Espionage Act. Mr. Franklin pled guilty Jan. 20th and was sentenced to more than...

Does anyone remember who Robert Stethem was? He was the the U.S. Navy Diver that Imad Mugniyah of the Hizbollah tortured and murdered, and tossed his body to the ground aboard Flight TWA Flight 847 in June, 1985 amid media coverage on the flight from Greece to Beirut. I am currently reading Kenneth Timmerman's book "The French Betrayal of America" to understand the current circumstances of Jack Chirac and his stooge Villipain and their role in the current crisis in the Iraq situtation--it is a must read--Please forgive me for quoting some very interesting background: "Mitterand's lecture (about fighting terrorism...

US vows to track down hijacker freed early By Anton La Guardia, Diplomatic Editor (Filed: 23/12/2005) The United States has vowed to track down and bring to trial a Lebanese hijacker who has been secretly released after serving 19 years in a German prison for seizing an airliner in 1985 and killing a US navy diver. The Bush administration said it had asked Germany not to release Mohammed Ali Hamadi, who was jailed for life for his role in the hijacking of TWA's Flight 847 from Athens to Rome and the shooting of one of the passengers, Robert Stethem. Despite...

Man Was Serving Life Sentence For Hijacking, Killing German authorities have paroled convicted terrorist Mohammed Ali Hamadi after he served 19 years of a life sentence for the 1985 hijacking of a TWA jetliner and the killing of a U.S. Navy diver, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.

Ceremonies mark ’85 Gander crash 248 U.S. soldiers killed instantly The Chronicle Herals From Our Wire Services December 12, 2005 GANDER, N.L. — Twenty years later, Joe McGuire vividly remembers getting the call. He was at home, asleep the morning of Dec. 12, 1985, when the ring of his telephone jarred him awake with news that an airplane went down after takeoff from the Gander International Airport. There were 248 U.S. soldiers on board the Arrow Air charter flight and eight civilian crew. McGuire, then the assistant commander for the RCMP in Gander, rushed to the scene. "When I got...

While certainly a perplexing holiday to many outside America, Thanksgiving's meaning isn't always clear to those stateside, either. I'll leave the history lessons to California Conservative, except to say it certainly is a major day around this neck of the woods. Can it partly be seen, however, as a day to reflect on that uniquely American way of overcoming life's obstacles? This week, I was interviewed for an entertainment industry trade publication, where I happened to mention two former coaches as influences. In the online article that appeared, there were links added to their own stories, that make this point...

Federal investigators in Germany have unearthed new evidence linking Iran to the 1985 bombing of a US military base that injured 35 people, a report said on Saturday. Iranian secret agents had allegedly detonated explosives concealed in a vehicle at the Frankfurt post-exchange food store on November 24, 1985, said the report in Focus news magazine. Focus said investigators believe the agents were members of a hit squad working on orders from Teheran to eliminate dissidents living in Europe in exile. The hit squad was also responsible for the deaths of two dissidents, one in Hamburg in 1987 and another...

One of the most intensely reported events of the 1980's, Hurricane Gloria hit Long Island, New York and southern Connecticut as a moderate hurricane in September 1985. At the time of landfall on Long Island - Gloria had sustained winds of around 85-mph. However, Gloria was moving forward at 40-mph when it struck land. This combination of sustained winds and rapid forward motion - produced peak winds of at least 111-mph across a narrow area of eastern Long Island. Thus, Gloria is considered a major hurricane on Long Island. In Connecticut, Gloria is considered a category 2 hurricane. Gloria was...

The millions donated to Ethiopia in 1985 thanks to Live Aid were supposed to go towards relieving a natural disaster. In reality, donors became participants in a civil war. Many lives were saved, but even more may have been lost in Live Aid's unwitting support of a Stalinist-style resettlement project Isn't it better to do something rather than give in to despair or cynicism and do nothing? This is the reproachful question familiar to anyone who has criticised organisations that view themselves as dedicated to doing good in the world. To those UN agencies, relief organisations and development groups working...

WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Twenty years after he drowned in his cabin on the sabotaged Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, photographer Fernando Pereira was honored Sunday with a marble sculpture lowered to the seabed beside the sunken ship in which he died. As supporters and friends prepared to ease the sculpture into 85 feet of water in New Zealand's Matauri Bay, a French newspaper reported this weekend that the French spy agencies that sank the ship in 1985 with two mines placed by frogmen had direct approval from then President Francois Mitterrand. The vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, had been readying to...

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...

Police in Sweden say Iraq's former information minister could have been involved in the brutal murder of an Iraqi agent there 18 years ago. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf - "Comical Ali" - became ambassador to Sweden shortly after the killing in 1985. Officers in Stockholm have confirmed they have received a tip-off claiming he was implicated. Iraqi Majid Husain had sought asylum in Sweden and planned to tell officials about Iraq's security apparatus and agents in Europe, it is reported. But he disappeared - his body was found two months later chopped into 54 pieces and stuffed into two suitcases. Police...

Uli Derickson, the Trans World Airlines flight attendant honored for saving passengers' lives in 1985 by both confronting and mollifying terrorist hijackers, died on Friday at her home in Tucson. She was 60. Ms. Derickson was still working as a flight attendant for Delta Air Lines when she received a diagnosis of cancer in 2003, her son, Matthew Derickson, said in announcing her death. On June 14, 1985, when a pair of Lebanese gunmen commandeered a T.W.A. flight from Athens to Rome, Ms. Derickson took the lead in protecting the 152 passengers and crew members. Though the two hijackers spoke...

War brutalizes man, every afghan bears living testimony to this. If the landscape of Afghanistan bears the craters of the endless war, the political and military leadership in Afghanistan also carries war's indelible scars. It is important never to lose sight of this. Ahmed Shah Mas'ud was born to an army family in 1953 in the Panjshir Valley north of the Afghan capital Kabul. His father was a colonel in the Afghan Army and enrolled his son at Kabul's Lycee Istiqlal High School. Upon graduation Mas'ud joined Kabul's Polytechnic Institute. In 1973 King Zahir Shah was deposed and exiled by...

"Mr. President, today as we hear much rhetoric in the U.S. Senate about the spread of communism throughout the world and the need of the United States to make efforts to try to respond to that so-called threat." He said this in the context of supporting his resolution to pressure Marcos and the Phillipines for democratic reform. He may have been right on some aspects, but once again his rhetoric was naive and dangerous.

1984 Debate

WASHINGTON (AP) — Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show. Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press. One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech...

I just found out on an interview on CNBC that Kerry supported communists in Nicaragua in the 80's, against Reagan's policy. Kind of like what he did with Vietnam. ----------------- Sen. John Kerry wants to be president of the United States so he can promote a brand of multi-nationalism as the solution to the world's problems. In fact, his views on that subject haven't changed that much since he came back from Vietnam in 1970, urging the United Nations take over command of the U.S. military forces. In April 1985, Kerry, along with Sen. Tom Harkin, ventured to Nicaragua to...