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WASHINGTON—Two days after a diplomatic deadline has passed for Iran to enter negotiations with the world's great powers and end the reprocessing and enrichment of uranium, the chief of the country's Revolutionary Guard Corps is threatening to close down one of the world's most critical oil chokepoints, the Straits of Hormuz. Speaking to Iranian reporters after testing a new anti-ship missile, Mohammad Ali Jafari said it could sink "enemy ships" at a range of more than 200 miles, and that shutting down the Straits of Hormuz would be easy. "Enemies know that we are easily able to block the Straits...

Their infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad . . . Be assured, Baghdad is safe, protected. There are no American infidels in Baghdad . . . There is no presence of American infidels in the city of Baghdad. -- Saddam's Information Minister Muhammed Saeed al-Sahaf, AKA "Baghdad Bob." Not bad, Bob. But if you want to see how flackery is done at its supremely sycophantic best, you should have tuned into tonight's "Tucker" to catch Lanny Davis's act. View video here.

The latest Gallup Poll is out and it shows a small surge for Fred Thompson, while Mitt Romney falls, and Ron Paul falls along with him:WASHINGTON — Former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson has gotten a modest bump in support after finally announcing he’s running for the Republican presidential nomination, a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll finds. And Arizona Sen. John McCain may have started to turn around his beleaguered campaign.McCain, who bottomed out in a USA TODAY poll in mid-August after financial woes and a staff shake-up, has rebounded by 4 percentage points, to 15%. Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has slipped...

ABC News has been told the White House is in "panic mode" over the recent defections of Republican senators on the president's stay-the-course policy in Iraq. Senior Bush administration officials are deep in discussion about how to find a compromise that will "appease Democrats and keep wobbly Republicans onboard," a senior White House official told ABC News. [snip]"We're not retreating or announcing troop withdrawal," the official said, but, "we need to buy more time for Petraeus." The White House has not reached any kind of consensus about what to do, despite the high-level discussions. The White House suggests a much-anticipated...

CARACAS, Venezuela -- President Hugo Chavez said Friday that Fidel Castro is not dying of cancer, saying he had spoken with the ailing Cuban leader by phone and he is eating cautiously and well enough to joke. "Fidel doesn't have cancer. I'm very well-informed ... he's instructed (Cuban officials) to inform me of all the details of what is happening," Chavez said during a speech in Caracas. He said the two leaders had spoken twice on Thursday and discussed a series of new projects between Venezuela and Cuba, including plans for joint oil expeditions. He reiterated previous comments that Fidel's...

What if Baghdad Bob was right all along? Friday, December 08, 2006 Remember Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf? He was the former Iraqi information minister who became a folk hero in the West because of his unintentionally hilarious daily briefings even as coalition forces tightened the noose around the regime's neck. Nicknamed "Baghdad Bob" by a credulous American press corps all too willing to parrot Bush administration propaganda, the Iraqi bureaucrat had a talent for lurid prose that hinted at a poetic sensibility beneath the nonsense. Among my favorites were: "God will roast their stomachs in hell at the hands of the...

In an open letter, Saddam Hussein told Iraqis "victory was at hand" and urged insurgents to show magnanimity to opponents, saying he himself forgave Iraqis who aided the killers of his two sons. In the letter dictated to his chief lawyer Khalil Dulaimi during a four-hour meeting on Saturday in his prison, the former Iraqi leader also said Iraqis should put aside differences and set only one goal - to drive U.S. troops out of Iraq. "Victory is at hand but don't forget that your near-term goal is confined to liberating your country from the forces of occupation," Saddam said...

YOU WOULD think that a consensus report from all 16 U.S. intelligence services concluding that he has blown the "war on terror" would be a really big deal to the president. But that assumes that George W. Bush values intelligence. Clearly, he does not. So the news that a 2006 National Intelligence Estimate concludes the threat of terror against the United States has increased since 9/11, largely thanks to his irrational invasion of Iraq, has not disturbed Bush's branded "what, me worry'' countenance. Instead, predictably, the administration's response to the leaked conclusions of the shared assessments of both civilian and...

Lebanon, Reuters, AP, microcosm There is so much honest news to peddle, I don’t know why the media is offering us so much pure visible tommyrot when it comes to the Israeli attacks, unless they openly favor Hezbollah and have an axe to grind. We have some pretty compelling evidence that the results of the IDF attack on Qana was a put up job and the media’s trumpeting of it all was excessive and came without any serious investigation of Hezbollah’s claims. Reuters soon ran into trouble with their sad sorry attempt to peddle additional smoke signals in a photo...

The news wire services are circling the wagons around their propaganda photos from Qana: News agencies stand by Lebanon photos.8/1/06 3:02:32 pm:If the wire services truly want to settle the timing issue, all they need to do is release the actual timestamps from when the photographs were taken. Digital cameras automatically record this information in the photograph itself, so it would be a simple matter for the wires to provide it.Will they? Or are we simply supposed to take their word for it?UPDATE at 8/1/06 4:30:31 pm:For me, by the way, the timing issue is actually not the most damning...

  Nasrallah: Israel temporary country   Hizbullah chief says during televised speech ‘Lebanese are standing strong, and it is clear the enemy has not achieved any military objectives’; adds: When in any Arab-Israeli conflict were two million Israelis forced to flee or enter bomb shelters? Roee Nahmias  Hizbullah Chief Hassan Nasrallah said Saturday during a speech aired by Al-Manar TV "the bombardment of Afula is just the beginning. Many cities in (Israel’s) center will be attacked if the barbaric aggression against us continues. When in any Arab-Israeli conflict were two million Israelis forced to flee or enter bomb shelters?”...

Text of report by Lebanese Hezbollah TV Al-Manar on 24 July In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. "Fight them and Allah will punish them by your hands, cover them with shame, help you to victory over them, and heal the breasts of Believers." [Koranic verses] Within the context of the heroic epic fought by the Islamic Resistance and in fulfilment of its promise to defend the homeland, dignity, and honour, since 0800 [0500] today, the mujahidin have been confronting an armoured force of the enemy army, backed by a company of paratroopers, which its trying to advance...

CAIRO, Egypt — The U.S. airstrike that killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq, was just a stroke of luck, according to a Web statement posted Tuesday in the name of the umbrella group for Iraqi insurgents. The statement from the Mujahedeen Shura Council, or Consultative Council of Holy Warriors, was an attempt to discredit reports from the U.S. and Iraqi authorities that Zarqawi was known to be meeting key advisers at a house in a grove of palm trees north of Baghdad when U.S. fighter-bombers blasted the building last Wednesday evening.

Mohammed Saeed Al-Sahaf ('Baghdad Bob') THEN ...Al-Sahaf’s daily press briefings in the lead-up to the war and in its first weeks led to him being nicknamed Baghdad Bob or Comical Ali (an allusion to “Chemical Ali,” the nickname of former Iraqi defense minister Ali Hassan al-Majid.) He gained a considerable cult following, with several Web sites devoted to his outrageous claims...as coalition troops stormed the capital, al-Sahaf declared, "The infidels are committing suicide by the hundreds on the gates of Baghdad."... NOW On 25 June 2003, the London newspaper The Daily Mirror reported that al-Sahaf had been captured by coalition...

Could all problems cause move by US to take aggressive action. Could problems justify such moves? Maybe.

LONDON, September 22 (IranMania) - EU military attaches walked out in protest at a parade in Tehran Thursday after ballistic missiles were rolled past carrying vitriolic anti-US and Israeli slogans, diplomats told AFP. "There was a common position among the European Union members that, if the military parade included any slogans that attacked our allies, we would leave," said a diplomat. "The military attaches from the embassies of France, Italy, Greece and Poland were present at the parade, and when they saw the slogans they promptly left," said another diplomat. At the parade, Iran showed off six of its Shahab-3...

Mohammed Said al-Sahaf has been entertaining the world for the past three weeks. Kim Sengupta profiles Saddam’s minister of information Baghdad We shall slaughter them all. God will barbecue their bellies in hell. We trap and beat them everywhere. I triple guarantee you, there are no American soldiers in Baghdad.’ The last declaration was made while a US army Abrams tank could be clearly seen blazing away across the Tigris. Welcome to the world of Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, who until Tuesday was Iraq’s minister of information. During the war, Sahaf was by far the most high-profile member of Saddam Hussein’s...

We have received a number of requests for this graphic -- it isn't very well done -- but it makes a point. But feel free to use it and distribute it however you wish. It would be funny if there weren't alot of truth to it. It was posted on our website at Americans for Dr. Rice with the following: One would think so after watching his continuing efforts to undermine the US War on Terror for his own political motives during yesterday's Senate testimony of Donald Rumsfeld, high ranking generals and DoD officials. He used the occasion as a...

Arab Media: Our Faith, Their Lies Dr. Khaled Batarfi, kbatarfi@al-madina.com When the “Voice of Arabs” radio told us triumphantly in the 1960s that Nasser’s Egypt had the strongest army in the region and could throw Israel in the sea if they choose to, we believed. When young, revolutionary, the Libyan President Muammar Qaddafi promised to be the unifier of the Arab world after the death of Nasser, we believed. When Baathists and Arab nationalists carried the “One Arab nation with eternal message” slogan, we believed. Then came “Alnakbah” (the disaster) of June 5, 1967, when the one army of Israel...

Former Iraqi deputy prime minister Tariq Aziz is unwilling to testify against Saddam Hussein at a future war crimes trial, his lawyer told Agence France-Presse after a four-hour meeting with his client on Thursday at a US base near the capital. "Tariq Aziz told me that he will not take the witness stand against Saddam," said Badi Aref Izzat. The lawyer said that Aziz, who has been in US custody since his surrender in the immediate aftermath of last year's US-led invasion, had had no opportunity to see the ousted president. The 11 senior aides currently in custody were being...

FOR TWO WEEKS Eason Jordan has been engulfed in a blogswarm. During remarks at the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, the now-former CNN executive accused the U.S. military of deliberately targeting journalists in Iraq for murder. The unleashed fury of the blogosphere eventually overcame a media blackout to force Jordan from his job, discredit the American media, and start a debate on the nature of blogging that derived directly from the mainstream media's attempt to cast the entire effort as a partisan witch hunt.But the media has no one but itself to blame--as it stubbornly refused to acknowledge the existence...

Bob Mulholland, official spokesman for the California Democratic Party, recently referred to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s support for redistricting as a “Hitler-esque power grab.” The comment, made just days after Schwarzenegger led the annual Capitol Hanukkah celebration, was published in the Capitol Morning Report, a newsletter read religiously by political insiders and news reporters in Sacramento. Although Mulholland’s comparison of the governor and the man who slaughtered millions of innocent people surely reached the desk of every policymaker in California, only one responded. Republican Assemblyman Todd Spitzer, a board member of the Anti-Defamation League in his Orange County district, was quoted...

That’s right, they won. And they won big. No, it’s not just that Dems came within 3% of winning a very tough election. That alone is a very real and important accomplishment, but it’s not the key. The real point is that if the Democrats are serious about the long-tem goal of building a broad and enduring democratic majority then getting 51% of the vote is not always the right test of a particular campaign’s success. Sometimes you have to lose an election to build the foundation for later victory. Just ask the Conservative Republicans. They can recite you this...

Special Dispatch Series - No. 805 October 26, 2004 No.805 Saudi Government Daily Editorial:'Bush the Nazi'   The Saudi government daily Al-Riyadh recently published an editorial titled "Bush the Nazi," referring to allegations that President George W. Bush's family had ties with the Nazis. The following are excerpts from the editorial: [1] Did President Bush's Grandfather Collaborate with the Nazis? "[The British newspaper] The Guardian published what it contends are documents incriminating the president's grandfather of collaboration with the Nazis and bringing [Adolf] Hitler to power, and that his wealth was an outcome of agreements with the Nazis, and...

In the first debate between President Bush and Senator Kerry, Kerry said again and again that Americans are suffering 90 percent of the casualties in Iraq, and that American taxpayers are paying 90 percent of the costs. In the vice-presidential debates, Sen. John Edwards said the same thing. It would be a tremendously effective line in proving Kerry's point that we "pushed our allies aside" and went to war unthinking and unprepared. It would be a tremendously effective line if it were true, that is. But like so much else in the Democrats' relentless attack on the war, it...

Even for Democrats, they have reached a new low. They are, to the astonighment of my eyes, DENYING that Kerry ever mentioned "Global Test". Yup, that's right. In their ad, they cut it out of the quote, and when asked on talk shows about "Global Test", they do not respond but only say "the Senator affirmed the right to preemption". Unbelievable, even for the Democrats -- I'm serious! I'm used to spin and scare tactics, but I've never seen outright denials in the face of facts that were seen by the ENTIRE COUNTRY. It is reminiscent of the Iraqi Minister...

Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, the former Iraqi Minister of Information, who is perhaps better known to most Americans by the affectionate moniker "Baghdad Bob," will join CBS on its critically-acclaimed TV news-magazine "60 Minutes" this fall. It is believed that Mr. Bob is the only living person willing to risk his personal integrity by appearing with Dan Rather in public. He claims to "stand behind" Dan Rather in his blatant attempt to topple President Bush. Speaking from an undisclosed location, Mr. Bob said, "although the forged- document thing is a little out of date, and, may I say, they did a...

VIENNA (Reuters) - The U.N. nuclear watchdog has found no signs of nuclear-related activity at a site in Iran called Parchin that several U.S. officials have said may be linked to secret atom bomb research, Mohamed ElBaradei said on Friday. "We are aware of this new site that has been referred to. We do not have any indication that this site has nuclear-related activities. However, we continue to investigate this and other sites (in Iran)," ElBaradei told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) He added that he would be going to South...

Just saw this in another group. Is it true?

The purpose of FreeRepublic.com's multiple message boards is to limit the topics for each board to particular topics. Posting the same message on all the boards defeats the purpose of multiple-boards for special topics. It is very annoying to see the same message on every bulletin board. PLEASE! DO THE READERS A FAVOR. STOP CROSS-POSTING YOUR MESSAGES!

US has commented on the helo attack. Just breaking

Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad gave a wide-ranging interview at his home, "The People's Palace" in Damascus, to Ghassan bin Jiddou of Al-Jazeera. The date of the interview was not disclosed, but it took place prior to the April 27, 2004 reported terror attack in Damascus. The interview covered numerous topics, including inter-Arab relations, Iraq, terrorism, Syrian-U.S. and Syrian-European relations, the Syrian influence in Lebanon, and Israel and the Palestinians. The following are extensive excerpts from the interview: [1] Developments in Iraq "The Americans will sink into a quagmire. All the occupation forces, not only the Americans. The Iraqis will pay...

BY JAMES TARANTO Friday, April 30, 2004 4:11 p.m. EDT Joe Says It Was So Remember Joe Wilson, the loudmouthed former ambassador who stirred up a kerfuffle last year by claiming that BUSH LIED!!!! when he purportedly said Saddam Hussein's Iraq had sought to buy uranium in Niger? Now Wilson has a book out, and it seems he's changing his story. The Washington Post reports: It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade--an overture...

Book Names Iraqi in Alleged '99 Bid to Buy Uranium By Susan Schmidt Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, April 30, 2004; Page A16 It was Saddam Hussein's information minister, Mohammed Saeed Sahhaf, often referred to in the Western press as "Baghdad Bob," who approached an official of the African nation of Niger in 1999 to discuss trade -- an overture the official saw as a possible effort to buy uranium. That's according to a new book Joseph C. Wilson IV, a former ambassador who was sent to Niger by the CIA in 2002 to investigate reports that Iraq had been...

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US support for the conflict in Iraq is eroding, according to the latest CNN/Time survey, which found, amid a new Iraqi insurgency against US troops, that 57 percent of Americans think US military goals will fail unless a tougher stance is taken. Approval of US President George W. Bush and his administration's handling of Iraq was down to 44 percent of Americans, according to the poll, new elements of which were released Sunday, down from 51 percent surveyed March 26-28. Meanwhile, Bush's overall approval rating had sunk to a record low of 49 percent since CNN/Time started...

President Bush is facing increasing dissent among leading conservative politicians and pundits in the face of mounting U.S. casualties in Iraq. The war has become the long slog that some Republicans feared. Since Sunday, 32 Americans have been killed in fighting across Iraq. American body bags are on the front page of major U.S. newspapers. The Washington Post and The New York Times brandished images of charred U.S. civilian remains last week. The networks are leading their nightly news broadcasts with stories of dead Americans. "If we have two or three more weeks of this you are going to start...

The Inadvertently Correct award goes to KOIN (CBS) affiliate’s Dave Erickson for noticing that footage of a Guernsey with mad cow disease was not the correct graphic to accompany a story about Potland, that is Portland, Mayor Vera “Darth Vader” Katz. Erickson’s award plaque, which is a bathroom tile bas relief of Walter Cronkite frowning at Rudy Giuliani for restricting the rights of muggers in Central Park, will have crossed silver oscilloscope probes....(Snip) The Radio Logic award for 2003 goes to the unnamed local newscaster who pointed out that Oregon’s high unemployment rate was due to a lack of jobs....

I Was Kidnaped"--Aristide "I was kidnaped by U.S. Marines and forced to leave Haiti," Jean-Bertrand Aristide told Congresswoman Maxine Waters in a phone call Monday morning from the Central African Republic. "I did not resign." Photo: President Aristide lofting flag during bicentennial celebration. Waters said that Aristide told her that the U.S. "completed the coup and forced him out of office." Speaking to Amy Goodman on Democracy Now, Waters said that Aristide sounded angry and outraged about what had happened. "He said he and his wife were surrounded by military personnel and not allowed to make calls. ‘It's like being...

THE Pentagon has denied any knowledge of Osama bin Laden's "arrest" after an Iranian report that he has been held for some time. The external Pashto-language service of Iranian state radio quoted an "informed source". It suggested bin Laden had been detained "some time ago", but the news was being kept secret and was likely to be announced later in the year to boost US President George W. Bush's re-election chances. A Pentagon Central Command spokesman in Tampa, Florida, said: "I have no reports on us capturing OBL, Osama bin Laden. We don't have anything on that." The Iranian report...

(Thursday, February 12th) Communication Minister of Iran Ali Unesi rejected threats of the American President George Bush pertaining to the Islamic Republic. "We do not doubt American President's stupidity. However, we do not think that the US will invade Iran," declared Unesi. According to him, American threats are nothing but an expression of conservative and aggressive politics. "Obviously, Bush has already learned a lesson after attacking Afghanistan and Iraq. Americans failed miserably in both cases," said the Iranian Minister. He also proclaimed that "Washington does not have guts to invade Iran." "A recent celebration of the anniversary of Islamic revolution...

French photographer wins World Press Photo 13 February 2004 AMSTERDAM — French photographer Jean-Marc Bouju was named on Friday as the winner of the World Press Photo competition. The international jury of the 47th annual World Press Photo, which is run from Amsterdam in the Netherlands, chose a colour image from Bouju that shows an Iraqi man comforting his 4-year-old-son at a Prisoner of War centre near Najaf, Iraq.The picture was taken on 31 March 2003 and can be viewed at http://www.worldpressphoto.nl/index.jsp. Some 4,176 professional photographers from 124 countries participated in this year’s contest, the premier annual international competition...

Friday, January 16, 2004 Iraq's deposed leader Saddam Hussain will be tried in an Iraqi court by Iraqi judges, senior member of the Iraqi Governing Council Mohammed Bahr Al Oloum said. He criticised the US decision to designate the former Iraqi leader, captured by American forces in December, as a prisoner of war. He said the council has protested the decision. "He is not a prisoner of war. He is a war criminal," he told Gulf News on the sidelines of a lecture he gave in Bahrain Wednesday night. "The man was not captured during the war; he was caught...

REBUILDING IN THE GULF'Baghdad Bob' now expert TV commentator'We all were expecting Saddam would kill himself rather than be caught' Posted: January 13, 20045:00 p.m. Eastern © 2004 WorldNetDaily.com The man known as "Baghdad Bob" and "Comical Ali" for his outrageous statements to the media during the Iraq war has returned to television as an expert commentator on Saddam Hussein. 'Baghdad Bob' Muhammed al-Sahhaf, Iraq's former information minister, has made several appearances on Abu Dhabi TV in the United Arab Emirates since Saddam's Dec. 13 capture, reports Britain's Sky News. "Finding Saddam wasn't surprising," said al-Sahhaf, who now lives in the UAE...

<p>January 12, 2004 -- It's the all-new Baghdad Bob - he's cleaned up his act, dyed his hair and he's back on the air. Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf, the Iraqi minister of disinformation who became famous for his absurd daily reports that Iraq was winning the war, has popped up on Arab television as a commentator - as these new exclusive photos show.</p>

A study of television news coverage of the war in Iraq says ABC’s World News Tonight was the most antiwar — far more than CBS, NBC or Fox. — USA Today, September 9 Antiwar? What are we to make of that word, exactly? For starters, it brings to mind a twelve-year-old study on press coverage of the Catholic Church by the Center for Media and Public Affairs, the same outfit that did the study mentioned above. The findings then: press coverage is anti-Catholic. The center, which works to maintain a neutral image, did not use exactly those words but did...

The left-wing media have been working overtime to spin news coverage of the Hussein arrest. I was not surprised to see ordinary Iraqis cheering Saddam’s capture and firing rifles into the air. What has been surprising is the negative media coverage and the shameless exploitation of the war for partisan political purposes that I’ve seen since returning from Iraq in September. It’s almost as if what we did over there never happened and doesn’t matter,” one of my staff sergeants told me. “But what we did, and what the U.S. military is still doing, does matter, as the Iraqis whom...

N ews of U.S. troops nabbing deposed Iraqi President Saddam Hussein is still all over the Internet these days, but only this writer has managed to snap up the exclusive scoop of former Iraqi Information Minister Baghdad Bob's take on the surprise capture. Here is what everybody's favorite propaganda master had to say to me about the fall of his former boss, Saddam. Marni Soupcoff: Bob, such a long time had passed since the fall of Baghdad in April, I think a lot of people were beginning doubt that the Americans would ever capture Saddam Hussein. Were you surprised to...

The capture of Saddam Hussein is good news to virtually everyone, except those who have been looking for a quagmire in Iraq from day one. Back when the war was just getting under way last spring, a dust storm that temporarily stopped the American troops advancing toward Baghdad was loudly proclaimed as a quagmire by some media deep thinkers.With all the complaints about what has not been done yet in Iraq, we need to step back and think about the fact that less than a year has elapsed since the war began. This should be in the Guinness Book of...