Free Republic

Senate Democrats’ ‘torture report’ claims tactics played no role in finding al Qaeda leaderSenate Democrats’ argument that harsh CIA interrogations played no role in finding Osama bin Laden revolves in crucial ways around the life of Hassan Ghul. It was Ghul, an al Qaeda operative who moved between Pakistan and Iraq, who turned out to be the most informative biographer of Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. It was al-Kuwaiti who eventually led the CIA to bin Laden’s home address in Abbottabad, Pakistan. To Democratic staffers who wrote the Dec. 9 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s detention and interrogation...

After Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May 2011, top CIA officials secretly told lawmakers that information gleaned from brutal interrogations played a key role in what was one of the spy agency's greatest successes. Then-CIA Director Leon Panetta repeated that assertion in public, and it found its way into a critically acclaimed movie about the operation, "Zero Dark Thirty," which depicts a detainee offering up the identity of bin Laden's courier, Abu Ahmad al-Kuwaiti, after being tortured at a secret CIA interrogation site. As it turned out, bin Laden was living in al-Kuwaiti's walled family compound,...

In 2001, a small U.S. special operations force had won extraordinary victories in Afghanistan and closed in on Bin Laden before high-level blunders allowed him to escape into Pakistan. Exactly twelve years ago, during the cold Winter days between December 10-16, in the jagged mountains of Tora Bora that separate Afghanistan from Pakistan, Osama bin Laden walked unencumbered into Pakistan and disappeared for nine and a half years. Just before, however, bin Laden had made an egregious error. After spending a couple seconds too long on his radio, the CIA pinpointed bin Laden’s location to within ten meters. One hour...

I salute their service and sacrifice Many in the community are…infuriated, [O’Neill] says. “There’s a shitstorm around this.”—Rob O’Neill referring to SEALs going public, “The Man Who Killed Osama bin Laden…Is Screwed” “Frankly, a week ago Sunday, in the Situation Room, we all agreed that we would not release any operational details from the effort to take out bin Laden. That all fell apart on Monday—the next day.”—Then Defense Secretary, Robert Gates 5/12/11 Our present POTUS tells lies like they are an art form he is determined to master. God knows he has shown a remarkable flair for it—although if...

'People are asking if we are worried that ISIS will come and get us because Rob is going public. I say I'll paint a big target on my front door and say come and get us.'

FOX News Channel (FNC) will present a new documentary entitled "The Man Who Killed Usama Bin Laden" hosted by Washington correspondent Peter Doocy, on Tuesday, November 11th and Wednesday, November 12th from 10-11PM/ET. The two-night presentation will feature an exclusive interview with the Navy SEAL who says he fired the shots that killed terrorist leader Usama Bin Laden. In the special, he describes the events leading up to and during the historical raid that took place on May 1st, 2011. Revealing his identity and speaking out publicly for the first time, the Navy SEAL, also known as “The Shooter,” will...

The commander of US Navy SEALs has issued a stinging rebuke to troops who have broken the elite force's hallowed tradition of secrecy and humility by publishing memoirs and speaking to the media. Days after the Fox News network announced it would broadcast a documentary with a commando who claims to have shot Osama bin Laden, Rear Admiral Brian Losey, the head of Naval Special Warfare Command, wrote to his troops denouncing anyone who seeks fame or fortune by revealing details of secret missions. "A critical tenet of our Ethos is 'I do not advertise the nature of my work,...

Venezuela’s Tarek El-Aissami The Americas Report | Oct 03, 2008  By Nicole Ferrand [...] Mr. El - Aissami is a Venezuelan national of Syrian descent who, before becoming Minster of Interior and Justice, occupied the position of Deputy Interior Minister for Public Security. His father, Carlos Aissami, is the head of the Venezuelan branch of the Iraqi Baath political party. Before the invasion of Iraq, he held a press conference in which he described himself as a Taliban and called Osama Bin Laden, "the great Mujahedeen, Sheik Osama bin Laden." Tarek's great-uncle Shibli el-Aissami was a prominent ideologist and...

[SNIP] ".....In all, the U.S. government would have access to more than a million documents detailing al Qaeda’s funding, training, personnel, and future plans. The raid promised to be a turning point in America’s war on terror, not only because it eliminated al Qaeda’s leader, but also because the materials taken from his compound had great intelligence value. Analysts and policymakers would no longer need to depend on the inherently incomplete picture that had emerged from the piecing together of disparate threads of intelligence—collected via methods with varying records of success and from sources of uneven reliability. The bin Laden...

Hours before the 9/11 terrorist attacks, former President Bill Clinton told an audience in Australia about his missed chance to kill attack mastermind Osama bin Laden, according to audio released this week. Clinton was speaking at a business meeting in Melbourne when the topic turned to terrorism. “I’m just saying, you know, if I were Osama bin Laden ... He’s a very smart guy. I spent a lot of time thinking about him. And I nearly got him once,” Clinton said in the audio, which was recorded by former Liberal Party head Michael Kroger and aired by Sky News. “I...

Just hours before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, former president Bill Clinton was in Australia telling businessmen that he “could have killed” Osama Bin Laden during his presidency, but chose not to, MSNBC reports. “I nearly got him,” he says on newly-released recordings of the September 10 meeting. “And I could have killed him, but I would have to destroy a little town called Kandahar in Afghanistan and kill 300 innocent women and children, and then I would have been no better than him. And so I didn’t do it.” Michael Kroger, one...

 *Actual Results May VaryEven as bumper sticker slogans go, it was a bit dubious from the start. Now it looks like it was actually the other way around.The claim seemed bogus from the moment the angry mob in Cairo chanted “Obama! Obama! There are still a billion Osamas!” right up through this month’s resurgence of al Qaeda in Iraq.And as far as GM goes, it appears that rumors of its survival may have been exaggerated as well. Despite life support efforts that included the removal of crushing debt from its books and infusions of billions in special future tax breaks,...

One of the five senior Taliban leaders transferred to Qatar in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl played a key role in al Qaeda’s plans leading up to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Mohammad Fazl, who served as the Taliban’s army chief of staff and deputy defense minister prior to his detention at Guantánamo, did not have a hand in planning the actual 9/11 hijackings. Along with a notorious al Qaeda leader, however, Fazl did help coordinate a military offensive against the enemies of the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan the day before. And Osama bin Laden viewed that...

President Barack Obama is moving ahead with his push to close the Guantanamo Bay prison despite the uproar over the exchange of five Taliban prisoners for a captured American soldier, an administration official said Thursday. The Periodic Review Board has determined that more former 'forever prisoners,' including one who says he has been reformed by practicing yoga and another who was a bodyguard for Bin Laden but now wants to start a 'milk and honey farm' are fit for release to their homelands or repatriation. Ghaleb Nasser al Bihani, 35, told a parole board in April that he had read...

Two court decisions provide insights into the career of Khairullah Khairkhwa, who was recently transferred from Guantanamo to Qatar along with four other senior Taliban leaders in exchange for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl. On May 27, 2011, District Court Judge Ricardo Urbina published his opinion rejecting Khairkhwa's petition for a writ of habeas corpus. And, on Dec. 14, 2012, the DC Circuit Court issued its ruling affirming Judge Urbina's opinion. The courts concluded that Khairkhwa was a member of the Taliban's Supreme Shura council, an elite group of 10 leaders who reported directly to Mullah Omar. The Shura oversaw the Taliban's...

With her memoir, Hard Choices set to be released in the coming weeks, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and her publishing company have provided an excerpt in which she claims President Obama’s actions during the Bin Laden raid were “as crisp and courageous a display of leadership” that she had ever seen. Here are 7 reasons that Obama’s leadership during the raid was neither crisp or courageous...

The lawyer for a doctor accused of helping the US find Osama Bin Laden has told the BBC that he has quit the case after receiving frequent death threats. Lawyer Samiullah Afridi also cited US pressure on Pakistan for the release of Dr Shakil Afridi as another reason for his decision. Dr Afridi is accused of using the cover of a door-to-door vaccination campaign to help the US find Bin Laden.

A camp on the Libyan coastline meant to train terror-hunters has instead become a haven for terrorists and al Qaeda. A key jihadist leader and longtime member of al Qaeda has taken control of a secretive training facility set up by U.S. special operations forces on the Libyan coastline to help hunt down Islamic militants... In the summer of 2012, American Green Berets began refurbishing a Libyan military base 27 kilometers west of Tripoli in order to hone the skills of Libya’s first Western-trained special operations counter-terrorism fighters. Less than two years later, that training camp is now being used...

Attorney Stanley Cohen, who has defended Osama bin Laden's son-in-law and the leader of Hamas .. SYRACUSE, N.Y. -- Stanley Cohen, a prominent lawyer who has represented political activists and terrorism suspects, among them Osama bin Laden's son-in-law, pleaded guilty this morning in Syracuse to obstructing the IRS. ... Last month, Cohen was the lawyer representing Osama bin Laden's son-in-law in a high-profile New York City criminal trial. Sulaiman Abu Ghaith was convicted of conspiring to kill Americans and of other terrorism charges. ... Assistant U.S. Attorney John Duncan wrote that Cohen failed to file tax returns from 2005 through...

Soon after the Navy SEAL raid on Bin Laden’s house, a Pakistani official told me that the United States had direct evidence that the ISI chief, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, knew of Bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad. Colleagues at The Times began questioning officials in Washington about which high-ranking officials in Pakistan might also have been aware of Bin Laden’s whereabouts, but everyone suddenly clammed up. It was as if a decision had been made to contain the damage to the relationship between the two governments. “There’s no smoking gun,” officials in the Obama administration began to say. America’s...