Free Republic

<p>UENOS AIRES - Three months ago, the shattered glass of bank windows littered the city's streets, graffiti screamed from seemingly every corner for the overthrow of the nation's politicians, and daily looting, rioting, and marches led to bloodshed, with one outpouring of fury leaving 27 dead in front of the president's pink palace.</p>

Authorities Conclude Switzerland Likely Used as Base for Financing, Logistical Support for 9/11 Attacks by Al-Qaida By Daniela Sigrist Associated Press Writer Published: Jun 24, 2004 BERN, Switzerland (AP) - Investigators have concluded that Switzerland was likely used as a base for financing and logistical support for the Sept. 11 attacks by al-Qaida, the country's attorney general said Thursday. Federal Prosecutor Valentin Roschacher said authorities plan to begin court proceedings in the coming weeks in three terror cases, capping investigations started four days after the 2001 suicide hijackings in New York and Washington. A special task force initially was charged...

LONDON (AP) - A British judge Friday imposed a 13-year prison sentence on a man who admitted conspiring with shoe-bomber Richard Reid to blow up a U.S.-bound trans-Atlantic jet in 2001. Prosecutors said they believe British-born Saajid Badat, 25, may have backed out of an alleged plot with Reid, who was subdued by passengers when he attempted to detonate a bomb aboard an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on Dec. 22, 2001. ``Turning away from crime in circumstances such as these constitutes a powerful mitigating factor,'' Judge Adrian Fulford said. ``It can take considerable courage to plead guilty...

The Rules of War Can't Protect Al Qaeda By RUTH WEDGWOOD NEW HAVEN — It makes no sense to win a trial but lose the war. With this in mind, a majority of the American public favors giving President Bush the option to use military tribunals against the Qaeda terror network. The tribunals are designed to permit a "full and fair trial" of war crimes without compromising our ability to track the network's future plans. Al Qaeda's skill at countersurveillance has made plain the need to protect sensitive intelligence sources at trial. But some international-law scholars suggest that President Bush's ...

OSLO (AFP) - The founder of radical Islamist group Ansar al-Islam was questioned in Oslo by German police ahead of the arrests in Germany of three men suspected of plotting to attack visiting Iraqi Prime Minister Iyad Allaiwi. German police interrogated Mullah Krekar in Oslo early last week and he is thought to be linked to at least one of the men arrested on Friday on suspicion of planning attacks during Allawi's visit, the Norwegian daily VG reported Sunday. All three have been ordered held over their alleged membership of Ansar al-Islam, described by German authorities as a foreign terrorist...

(CBS) A German resident held by the U.S. for almost five years tells 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley that Americans tortured him in many ways - including hanging him from the ceiling for five days early in his captivity when he was in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Even after determining he was not a terrorist, Murat Kurnaz says the torture continued. Kurnaz tells his story for the first time on American television this Sunday, March 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT. Kurnaz, an ethnic Turk born and raised in Germany, went to Pakistan in late 2001 at age 19 to study Islam and...

Canada bankrolled man's aid agency during that time U.S. authorities have tied a Canadian aid worker to the al-Qaeda terrorist network as far back as 1988, almost a decade before the Canadian government cut off funding to his Ottawa-based Muslim charity. Evidence unsealed by a U.S. judge in Chicago shows Ahmed Said Khadr had dealings with senior al-Qaeda leaders while being financed by the Canadian International Development Agency. Although CIDA stopped giving aid money to Mr. Khadr in 1997 after he was arrested for allegedly bombing an embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, the documents allege he was working with al-Qaeda long...

A British-born suicide bomber plotted to bring down a packed passenger aircraft over the Atlanttic at the same time that the shoe bomber Richard Reid targeted an American Airlines flight, the Old Bailey heard today. But Saajid Badat changed his mind and dismantled his own shoe bomb, which was designed to evade airport security. Badat, 25, from Gloucester, admitted conspiring to blow up an aircraft between January 1 1999 and November 28, 2003 in a surprise change of plea today. He had been due to stand trial for the offence. Intelligence services believe Badat had been conspiring with Reid, a...

French anti-terror magistrates wrapped up an investigation into four Islamists who may have helped British shoe bomber Richard Reid in France. Le Parisien reports the suspects include the head of a Paris mosque, the leader of a Pakistani community and two other men. Reid spent several days in Paris before boarding a Miami-bound plane in December 2001 with explosives stuffed in his sneakers. Last year, Reid was sentenced to life in prison by a U.S. court for trying to blow up the flight. One of the French suspects, Imam Kamel Lakhram, reportedly acknowledged to French authorities Reid had slept at...

Unrepentant, and convinced that Muslims across the world are the victims of American oppression, the mind of Richard Reid, the attempted shoe bomber from South London, was shown today in a letter published in a Scottish legal magazine. The letter, written by Reid from his prison cell in America on October 24, 2002, and published by The Firm magazine today, was sent to the magazine's US correspondent instead of an interview. In the letter, Reid, now 31, gave a rambling but cogent reply to a note sent to him by Noel Young, The Firm's journalist, who offered Reid the chance...

The Comoros: foreign troops unload on the island of Mohéli MORONI, 19 déc (AFP) - foreign troops unloaded Wednesday morning on the island comorienne of Mohéli, and took control of the army, the gendarmerie and the police force, according to testimonys' on the spot, of which that of a former minister, contacted on the telephone. The attackers launched leaflets affirming that they were "the army of the United States" and that their intervention was related to the fight against terrorism, according to inhabitants' of the capital, Fomboni, of which the former minister Mohamed Hassanari. Military formation, of almost a ...

JAKARTA, April 14 (IslamOnline) - Alleged Al-Qaeda operative, Yazid Sufaat, denied terror charges, while he admitted that he met two Arab nationals at his condominium in Kuala Lumpur two years ago, a news report from Malaysiakini.com said on Sunday. However, Sufaat, high on the FBI list of suspects from South East Asia, who might be members or operatives of the Al-Qaeda, stressed the duo could not be involved in the Sept 11 attacks as they were amputees shopping for prosthetic legs in Malaysia. The 37-year-old pathologist and former army captain, who is also a businessmen in Malaysia, told this to...

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) - Malaysia has arrested 13 suspected members of an Islamic militant group with links to Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman on trial for the September 11 attacks on the United States, Bernama news agency said on Friday. The suspects, belonging to a wing of a group the authorities call Kumpulan Militan Malaysia (KMM), had connections with Moussaoui when he was in Malaysia between September 4 and 15 and again on October 5 in 2000, the state-run news agency quoted Inspector-General of Police Norian Mai as saying. "They were arrested because they are believed to be carrying out activities ...

A SCOTTISH Muslim convert, dubbed the "Tartan Taleban", has re-emerged in Pakistan where he has reportedly been arrested as a terror suspect. Pakistan television paraded images of a man said to be James Alexander McLintock, who had been detained in the north-west city of Peshawar in late February. The 44-year-old father of four, originally from Dundee, converted to Islam in his 20s but came to international attention in December 2001 when he was arrested in Afghanistan on suspicion of being a foreign fighter. Mr McLintock was released five weeks later after strenuous denials of links to terror organisations and sent...

March 24, 2008, 5:00 a.m. Chilling ConfirmationYes, Saddam Hussein was an Islamofascist threat. By Deroy Murdock As Operation Iraqi Freedom is now five years old, a new study confirms that ousting Saddam Hussein was justified and vital to U.S. national security. Though war critics hate to admit it, the Baathist dictator was up to his mustache in aid for Islamofascist terrorism. As a report from the Institute for Defense Analyses explains, “captured Iraqi documents uncovered strong evidence that links the regime of Saddam Hussein to regional and global terrorism.� IDA’s review of some 600,000 documents discovered in Iraq since...

New York judge orders former Bosnian U.N. ambassador extradited

Botswana: Senator Jefferson Graces Nchindo Charge SheetMmegi/The Reporter (Gaborone) 10 January 2008 Posted to the web 10 January 2008 Tshireletso Motlogelwa The embattled United States Senator, William Jefferson has turned up in the charge sheet brought by the prosecution against former Debswana chief executive, Louis Nchindo and other senior members of the company. Jefferson, who late last year was served with a 95 page long indictment by the US department of justice on a wide range of criminal charges relating to his various trips to Africa, visited Botswana a few years ago on two occasions. Late last year, the media...

Every year, as we enter a New Year, my mind goes back to Daniel Pearl, the Mumbai-based American correspondent of Wall Street Journal, who met with a brutal end to his young life during a visit to Karachi in January 2002 to enquire, inter alia, into the suspected Pakistani links of international jihadi terrorists. In his keenness to find out the truth, Pearl fell into a treacherous trap laid by a mixed group of Pakistani terrorists belonging to different organisations and orchestrated by Omar Sheikh, a British resident of Pakistani origin, who had participated in the so-called jihad against the...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...