Free Republic

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- Al-Qaida conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui testified Monday that he and would-be shoe bomber Richard Reid were supposed to hijack a fifth airplane on Sept. 11, 2001, and fly it into the White House. Moussaoui's testimony on his own behalf stunned the courtroom as he disclosed details he had never revealed before. It was in stark contrast to Moussaoui's previous statements in which he said the White House attack was to come later if the United States refused to release a radical Egyptian sheik imprisoned on earlier terrorist convictions. Moussaoui testified Monday he lied to investigators when arrested...

Gems, al-Qaida and murder. Mystery over killing of Osama Bin Laden's friend · Saudi man's death was political, say his family· US secret service was monitoring his activities Nick Fielding Friday March 2, 2007 The Guardian (UK) Pallbearers carry the coffin of Muhammad Jamal Khalifa at Ivato airport in Antananarivo, in Madagascar. Photograph: Jasleen Sethi/Reuters When Muhammad Jamal Khalifa was found dead at a remote gemstone mine in south-eastern Madagascar at the end of January, local police quickly put the murder down to a business deal gone wrong. The Saudi businessman, 49, had had to call in local police to...

A federal jury in Dallas on Monday dealt the Stealth Jihad initiative in the United States a crushing defeat: it found five former officials of an Islamic charity, the Holy Land Foundation (HLF), guilty of funneling at least $12 million of the charity’s funds to the jihad terror group Hamas. The notorious “Muslim civil rights” group, the Council on American Islamic Relations, is involved as well, since Ghassan Elashi, a founding director of CAIR as well as founder of the group’s Texas chapter, was among those found guilty; Elashi and his co-defendants face prison sentences of up to twenty years...

A recently released propaganda video by the Islamic extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir is quite revealing. Not only does the video demonstrate the group’s growing effort to package arguments in a manner designed to appeal to Westerners on the political left, but it also serves as a barometer of radical Muslim groups’ broader shift in rhetorical strategy. The video, “Iraq: Past and Present Colonialism,” appears for the first twenty-seven minutes to be a standard leftist critique of the Iraq war, indistinguishable from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11. The slickly-produced video begins with the history of past colonialism in Iraq—including the Mongol conquest...

IN A LITTLE-NOTICED DECISION in a New York courtroom on September 25, 2003, a man described as Osama bin Laden's "best friend" got some good news. U.S. District Court Judge Deborah Batts ruled that Mahmdouh Mahmud Salim could not be sentenced to life in prison. Salim--who was present at the founding of al Qaeda in 1989 and who was for years one of bin Laden's most trusted confidants--had been captured in Germany in 1998 and extradited to the United States for prosecution related to his role in the grand conspiracy that resulted in the 1998 bombings at U.S. embassies in...

Willful Blindness   By David ForsmarkFrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, June 03, 2008 Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the JihadBy Andrew C. McCarthyEncounter, $25.95, 352pp.As the presidential election approaches and Democrats vow to reverse many of the Bush tactics in the Global War on Terror – and John McCain flirts with the disastrous idea of giving terrorists access to the American judicial system – it's worth revisiting the days of the "law enforcement" approach to fighting terrorists.Andrew McCarthy was the federal prosecutor who, against all odds, secured a long prison term for Omar Abdel Rahman, the "Blind Sheikh" who plotted the...

Those who support Operation Iraqi Freedom have welcomed the recently released study on Saddam Hussein's dealings with terrorists.Based on captured Iraqi documents held in a Defense Department database, the Institute for Defense Analysis study makes important points. It clearly demonstrates that no ideological barrier prevented Saddam's "secular" regime from working with "Islamic" terrorists and that his regime had dealings with a wide variety of terrorists.*snip*On the basis of the transcript of a meeting Saddam held with other senior Iraqi figures about the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the study concludes Iraq was not involved in the attack. Yet other captured...

Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the first terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, claims he converted from Islam to Christianity, Scott Pelley reports in a story that brings viewers inside the secretive "Supermax" prison where he is being held. Pelley also reports that some 900 force feedings were performed on other al-Qaeda terrorists who went on repeated hunger strikes to protest conditions at the Colorado top-security federal prison. The 60 MINUTES segment will be broadcast Sunday Oct. 14 (7:30-9:00 PM, ET/7:00-9:00 PM, PT) on the CBS Television Network. The prison in Florence, Colo., which the government calls ADX-Florence for...

One of the unindicted co-conspirators of the FIRST WTC bombing, Siraj Wahhaj, will be a speaker at a local Islamic Conference to be held THIS SUNDAY in Hartford, Connecticut. All Freepers and Lurkers in good standing are requested to drop everything to be in Hartford for this event. This meeting is being held by known HAMAS supporters, also.

VOTE SMARTMY RESPONSE TO'VOTE DIFFERENT'(Obama-Apple 1984 Ad Mashup)by Mia T, 3.10.07 COPYRIGHT MIA T 2007

SANTA ANA — An Orange County woman said in an expose that aired last night that her ex-husband is a Muslim extremist who helped set up an al Qaeda sleeper cell in their Anaheim apartment complex in the 1990s. Saraah Olson told ABC-TV's "Primetime Live" that her ex-husband, Hisham Diab, beat her, turned a local teenager into a terrorist fanatic, and brought other terrorists into their home. Authorities say the couple's former neighbor, Khalil Deek, is considered a major al Qaeda figure, and is believed to have run the Orange County cell -- one of the first al Qaeda sleeper...

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, ...

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan (Reuters) - Pakistan said Tuesday that two suspected militants arrested in the past few days were related to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged brains behind al Qaeda's attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001. Police arrested ten suspects in the southern port city of Karachi over the weekend, and ministers say one of them had a million dollar reward on his head. "We have arrested Mosaib al Baluchi. He is a nephew of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. There is a reward of a million dollars on him from the Americans," Interior Minister Faisal Saleh Hayat told Reuters...

Bill Clinton to Write New Book By SARA KUGLER, Associated Press Writer 15 minutes ago After writing an autobiography that sold millions of copies and earned him a hefty advance, former President Clinton has struck a deal to write another book. Alfred A. Knopf will publish the new work, in which Clinton will focus on public service and citizen activism, telling a story that he hopes will "lift spirits" and "touch hearts," Clinton said in a statement. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Clinton is said to have received a staggering advance of $10 million to $12...

Imam Fawaz Damra helped lay the groundwork for an organization that ultimately merged into al-Qaida in the late 1980s. He was an unindicted co-conspirator of the terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993. And he passionately raised money for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, which killed dozens of Jews in Israel during the 1990s. Yet Damra, spiritual leader to thousands of Muslims in Northeast Ohio, seemed to fly comfortably beneath the radar of U.S. terror investigators - until Tuesday. FBI agents swooped in on the Palestinian cleric at his Strongsville home, arresting him on a relatively minor - and...

2/26/91 Brig. Gen. Richard Neal in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, says Iraqi forces are in "full retreat" with allied forces pursuing; Iraqi POWs number 30,000-plus, number to climb to 63,000. USA Today website 2/26/91] Saddam Hussein announces Iraqi occupation forces will withdraw completely. USA Today website 2/26/91 Residents of Kuwait City celebrate end to occupation. Resistance groups set up headquarters to control city. USA Today website 2/26/91 The Iraqis, who had the Third World's largest poison-gas operations prior to the Gulf War I, have perfected the technique of making hydrogen-cyanide gas, which the Nazis called Zyklon-B. In the hands of al...

Recently translated documents captured by U.S. forces provide new evidence of a direct link between Saddam Hussein's regime and the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States. Rosters of officers in Saddam's Fedayeen list Lt. Col. Ahmed Hikmat Shakir, who was present at the January 2000 al-Qaida "summit" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, at which the 9-11 attacks were planned, the Wall Street Journal reports. The Fedayeen was the elite paramilitary group run by Saddam's son Uday, which was deployed to do much of the regime's dirty work. The U.S. has never been sure Shakir was at the Kuala...

The chairman of the independent commission investigating the 9/11 attacks is hinting that he's prepared to place blame at the doorstep of the Bush White House for not acting on evidence that could have prevented the catastrophe. But commission chairman, former New Jersey Gov. Thomas Kean, has yet to examine key evidence indicating that President Clinton knew Osama bin Laden was planning to attack America, but failed to take appropriate action to stop him as the 9/11 operation was being organized. "[9/11] was not something that had to happen," Kean told CBS News on Wednesday, adding that officials in...

Saddam's Fingerprints on N.Y. Bombings The Wall Street Journal By Laurie Mylroie June 28, 1993 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 ...

By JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. They also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the...

Terrorist Lawyerby George Packer for the New York Times, Sept. 23, 2003 "Finally [Ramsey] Clark told her that if she refused [to defend terrorists], the Arab world would feel betrayed by their friends on the American left." [excerpt] One Saturday morning in November 1994, Ramsey Clark, attorney general under President Johnson and more recently a spokesman for radical Arab causes, met in his Manhattan office with a criminal defense lawyer named Lynne Stewart. Clark wanted Stewart to take on a new client -- Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, a blind Egyptian cleric and the spiritual leader of the worldwide jihad movement,...