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WASHINGTON, Sept. 30 (UPI) -- Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was investigating the man who allegedly planned the Sept. 11 airplane hijackings and attacks on New York and Washington when he was kidnapped and murdered in Pakistan, according to two former Central Intelligence Agency officials. Bob Baer, a former case officer in the agency's Directorate of Operations, said he provided Pearl with unpublished information about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who has since been accused by American officials of being one of the masterminds of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and a top aide to Osama bin Laden. Mohammed is...

US Politicians Duped By The Brotherhood In the United States, one individual maintained a pretense of "moderation" which would later embarrass the left and the right. According to the testimony of Dr. Michael Waller to the US Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Abdurahman Alamoudi was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. A man born in Eritrea in 1951, he arrived in the US in 1979 and became a naturalized US citizen on May 23, 1996. From 1985 onwards he became involved in many Muslim groups. In 1990 he founded the Washington DC-based American Muslim Council (AMC), which Waller states "has...

IN a small flat in Damascus, a young man in jeans and T-shirt draws frequently on a Gauloises cigarette as he describes how he dressed his brother in a suicide belt and watched him blow up some American soldiers at a drinks stall in Iraq. The young man calls himself Ahmed. He is 23 and he has a degree in chemistry. He knows all about explosives. Last year, he says coolly, he took 15kg of TNT, packed it into pouches with some nails and strapped the bomb to his 19-year-old brother’s waist. There was never any doubt that it would...

In an order signed Monday, Southern District Judge Harold Baer Jr. ordered two firms serving as co-lead counsel in a securities class action against Gildan Activewear—Labaton Sucharow and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd—to "make every effort" to assign at least one minority and one woman to the case. "This proposed class includes thousands of participants, both male and female, arguably from diverse backgrounds, and it is therefore important to all concerned that there is evidence of diversity, in terms of race and gender, in the class counsel I appoint," the judge wrote in In re Gildan Activewear Inc. Securities Litigation,...

Chris Matthews, on Tuesday's Hardball, brought on two former CIA officials to discuss the latest terror attack, and the MSNBC host agreed with Tyler Drumheller that the most recent attacker was motivated by his house being foreclosed on and also agreed with Robert Baer who feared another attack could lead to "The Tea Party being strengthened" which could lead to "people blaming the White House for a situation it didn't create." Baer also hit Matthews' sweet spot of talking points when he went on to warn that the last successful terror attack "got us into a war in Iraq we...

No matter who is elected president in November, former CIA officer Robert Baer has no doubt about what will be topping his agenda: Iran. “Everything is coming to a head in the Middle East,” Baer tells Newsmax. “The days of messing around with Iran are over. We’ve been kicking this can down the road for 30 years, and now we’re at the end of the road.” The former CIA covert operative asserts that the Islamic nation of 70 million people is building an empire in the Middle East, believing it should be the “citadel of Islam.” He warns that Iran...

LeCLAIRE, Iowa — An Illinois custom gun manufacturer opened the new year at the same old place in Illinois as construction continues on a new facility across the river in LeClaire. Les Baer Custom of Hillsdale, Ill., announced in May it wanted to move out of Illinois and received approval of a development and site plan agreement in LeClaire. Heavy rains in August slowed construction. On Monday, owner Les Baer described the plant as being about 80 percent complete. Exterior work is completed, but some interior work must be finished on the building at the secluded 2.82-acre site between Iowa...

On April 18, 1983, someone drove a van packed with explosives into the United States embassy in Beirut, demolishing it and killing 63 people. Six months later, 241 Marines and soldiers were killed when their Beirut barracks were torn apart by a truck carrying 12,000 pounds of dynamite, which detonated the largest nonnuclear explosion since World War II. The twin suicide bombings shocked and intrigued Robert Baer, who at the time was stationed in Lebanon as a Central Intelligence Agency officer and knew several agency employees who had died in the embassy. He became preoccupied with who had plotted the...

The American spy who persuaded Libya to renounce its weapons of mass destruction is to return to the Central Intelligence Agency, where he will direct an aggressive drive to recruit informants inside Iran to aid possible negotiations over Teheran's nuclear capability. Stephen Kappes, a former United States Marines officer who resigned from the CIA after a clash with its then director, Porter Goss, has been brought back from self-imposed exile in London by George W Bush. Iran will be top of his agenda. "He's a remarkable guy, a talented leader and among the finest officers of his generation," said Gary...

Interviewing celebrities is cool. It's fun to sit next to George Clooney or Matt Damon as they discuss their new film, Syriana (and look for what they had to say later this week). But for me that's becoming old hat - I've interviewed plenty of actors and filmmakers. What the Syriana junket offered that was quite unique was the opportunity to interview a real live spy. Robert Baer was in the CIA from 1976 to 1997. He served as a case officer in the Directorate of Operations, working in places like Iraq, Khartoum and Beirut. Seymour Hersh calls him "perhaps...

Heads they win, tails we lose What would you call someone who wants to hand over control of Iraq to a group of terrorists that first made its reputation by blowing up a couple of American embassies? I'd call him President Bush. The group is called the Dawa party. In the early 1980s, Dawa terrorists bombed our embassies in Kuwait and in Lebanon. They were universally recognized as vicious America-hating, Iranian-supported terrorists. Now they're part of the coalition that is expected to win control of the new Iraqi parliament in Thursday's elections......I don't know what's weirder, that this is about...

Speech by John Loftus, former U.S. Deputy Attorney General Holocaust Remembrance Day Yom Ha Shoah - 2004 It always seems a little strange to have an Irish-Catholic talking about Yom Ha Shoah. I had an unusual education in the Holocaust. When I was working for the Attorney General, I was assigned to do the classified research about the Holocaust, so I went underground to a little town called Suitland, Maryland, right outside Washington, D.C. and that's where the US Government buries its secrets - - literally. There are twenty vaults underground and each vault is one acre in size. Anyone...

     An opportunity to avoid war lost by the Bush administration or an opportunity taken advantage of by ABC News to push its anti-war agenda? ABC led Wednesday night with “an ABC News investigation” of what Peter Jennings characterized as “what appears to be an opportunity lost” to work with “a man who was in the process of trying to broker a deal that might have avoided war with Iraq.”      Brian Ross proceeded to recount how in the weeks before the war a Lebanese businessman forwarded an offer from Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief to allow U.S. agents to travel...

1. Russell Crowe Triumphs in "Cinderella Man" In "Cinderella Man" (opening Friday, June 3rd), Russell Crowe once again proves that old-fashioned masculinity does not have to be completely absent from the movies. Directed by Ron Howard, "Cinderella Man" tells the uplifting, real-life story of Jim Braddock, the Depression-era boxer who rose from poverty and the soup lines to become heavyweight champion of the world. The movie has excellent moral values, and Russell Crowe (Jim Braddock), Renee Zellweger (his wife Mae Braddock), and Paul Giamatti (his manager Joe Gould) all do a fine job portraying the 30s-era characters with conviction and...

Matt Damon and George Clooney come back together for political thriller Matt Damon and George Clooney, who are currently working together on Steven Soder-bergh's Ocean's Eleven sequel - Ocean's Twelve, will reteam for the Stephen Gaghan-helmed political thriller Syriana. In addition, Amanda Peet is in final negotiations to join the project. Set up at Warner Bros., Clooney and Soderbergh's studio-based Section Eight will produce the project with shooting slated to begin during the summer. Gaghan adapted the script, which is loosely based on the Robert Baer non-fiction novel See No Evil: The True Story of a Foot Soldier in 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...

Sunday March 3, 2002 'Bombing Saddam is ignorance' Robert Baer, the ex-CIA man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, says the US is not in a position to strike against Iraq because it does not understand anything about the country Robert Baer's objections to an attack on Iraq could hardly be principled. As the CIA's point man in Iraq during the failed uprising in 1995, he encouraged dissident groups to believe that the United States wanted the overthrow and death of Saddam Hussein. Yet Baer, whose memoir of life in the CIA, See No Evil, is published ...

Uncovered: The War on Iraq Directed by Robert Greenwald Cinema Libre, opens August 20 Anybody who tries to deconstruct the new American empire erected by the Bush regime's schnooks and crooks winds up babbling to himself and others, "You can't make this shit up." But then you have to get your hands dirty and mold it into something that's interesting to look at. That's something Michael Moore did in Fahrenheit 9/11, but which Robert Greenwald doesn't do in Uncovered: The War on Iraq. Moore created a movie; Greenwald gives us a cinematized blog. His vast made-for-TV experience (The Burning Bed,...

Saddam Hussein's intelligence chief tried to arrange a meeting last week between US representatives and the former Iraqi leader, who an opposition official believes was seen about three days ago, ABC News reported. Leaders of Iraq's prominent Dulaym tribe told the US network that they had made contact with former CIA officer Bob Baer and others to try to arrange some kind of meeting."They told me the chief of Iraqi intelligence was seeking to get in touch with the United States and could I do anything about that," said Baer, who now works for ABC News.Saddam's intelligence chief, General...