Free Republic

It seemed an innocuous, catch-up phone call. Last year Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, the pseudonym for a Pakistani known to U.S. intelligence as the main courier for Osama bin Laden, took a call from an old friend. Where have you been? inquired the friend. We’ve missed you. What’s going on in your life? And what are you doing now?

Some liberals are trying to give all of the credit for the death of Osama bin Laden to Barack Obama and his enlightened leadership. But if we had fought the war on terrorism the way liberals wanted us to fight it, bin Laden would still be alive today and we wouldn’t have the first clue of how to find him. The New York Times and MSNBC have confirmed that the nom de guerre of a key courier for bin Laden, “Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti,” was obtained by interrogating detainees held at Guantanamo Bay. If we had listened to the liberals, Guantanamo...

Wait until Obama hears about this. Someone is selling body parts of a dead Courier. GRAPHIC IMAGE

They identified him as one of Bin Laden's couriers, an aide the terror chief trusted with his life. But details were scant and agents quickly found the trail went cold. It was not until 2004, when Al Qaeda operative Hassan Ghul was captured in Iraq, that the CIA began to make progress. Ghul told the intelligence service that al-Kuwaiti was a courier and that he was close to Faraj al-Libi, Al Qaeda's operational commander, who replaced Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.The pace of the pursuit then picked when U.S. soldiers captured al-Libi. Under CIA interrogation, al-Libi admitted that when he was promoted...

There’s a lot about the White House’s account that doesn’t quite add up. I’m not just talking about the changing story that led spokesman Jay Carney to admit: “Even I’m getting confused”. The erroneous details that Osama bin Laden was armed (he wasn’t), that his wife was used as a human shield (she wasn’t), that his wife was killed (she wasn’t) can be put down to over-egging the pudding or, if you’re feeling generous, the fog of war. What I’m talking about is the bigger picture of how bin Laden was discovered and who was killed in that compound. Don’t...

The view from (some) on the right in regard to the Bin Laden news is: waterboarding is vindicated. One GOP Congressman tweeted: Wonder what President Obama thinks of water boarding now? The reason is that there's a direct line to be traced from the big news to data collected at GITMO -- data that was almost certainly collected under duress. Here's the key interrogation note regarding a courier going to Abottabad: Rest @ link

Years of intelligence gathering, including details gleaned from controversial interrogations of Al Qaeda members during the Bush administration, ultimately led the Navy SEALs who killed Usama bin Laden to his compound in Pakistan. The initial threads of intelligence began surfacing in 2003 and came in the form of information about a trusted bin Laden courier, a senior U.S. official told Fox News on condition of anonymity. Bin Laden had cut off all traditional lines of communication with his network by this time because the Al Qaeda leader knew the U.S. intelligence community was monitoring him. It was said that he...

A member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee has told CNBC that the death of Osama Bin Laden was a direct result of enhanced interrogations."The information that eventually led us to this compound was the direct result of enhanced interrogations; one can conclude if we had not used enhanced interrogations, we would not have come to yesterday's action," US Senator Richard Burr in a telephone interview with CNBC. As a member of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Burr was briefed on the attack on the compound that led to Bin Laden's death and believes the failure of Pakistani security forces...

Apparently, the key to the whole operation was finding and tracking Bin Laden’s most trusted courier, a process that took years — and involved info given by Guantanamo detainees: Sunday afternoon’s raid by U.S. forces that killed Osama bin Laden was the “culmination of years of careful and highly advanced intelligence work,” senior administration officials said in a conference call, describing the genesis of an operation that sounded like it was right out of a “Mission Impossible” movie. Some time after Sept. 11, detainees held by the U.S. told interrogators about a man believed to work as a courier for...

THIBODAUX — Larry Luther didn’t see the Facebook post by a Terrebonne Parish child-support hearing officer about a barroom bouncer appearing before him who has 23 children and “too much time on his hands.” But people who read a Courier and Daily Comet story containing questions about the posting’s propriety had little trouble determining who the posting was about and called Luther to tell him. Now the 41-year-old grandfather says he is preparing to file a Louisiana Judiciary Commission complaint against the hearing officer, William Dunckelman. “I am waiting on the papers in the mail,” Luther said Friday night. “I...

Bill Clinton's chief of staff when he was governor of Arkansas is expected to turn herself in after authorities issued a bench warrant for her arrest for allegedly smuggling contraband into a state prison, her attorney told CNN Wednesday. Betsey Wright served Clinton as chief of staff for 7 years in Arkansas and ran 3 successful campaigns for governor. Betsey Wright allegedly smuggled a red Doritos bag containing 48 tattoo needles, a pen with tweezers and a needle inside, a Swiss Army knife and a box cutter into the Varner Unit, a high-security state prison in Grady, Arkansas, according to...

A 21-year-old citizen of Chad who has been held for seven years at the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba must be released, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday. U.S. District Judge Richard Leon said the government had not proven that Mohammed el Gharani was an enemy combatant and the detainee must be freed and sent home soon either to Saudi Arabia, where he was raised and his family lives, or Chad. Leon's ruling comes just before President-elect Barack Obama, who has vowed to close the prison camp, takes office on Tuesday. Since Obama's election in November, federal...

In a sign that no matter is too small to affect international diplomacy, the US State Department has issued an edict banning its longtime standard typeface from all official correspondence and replacing it with a "more modern" font. In an internal memorandum distributed on Wednesday, the department declared "Courier New 12" - the font and size decreed for US diplomatic documents for years - to be obsolete and unacceptable after February 1. "In response to many requests and with a view to making our written work easier to read, we are moving to a new standard font: 'Times New Roman...

At least six Arabs believed to have links to al Qaeda and carrying what some intelligence reports estimated was $23.5 million were seized by Syria last week, according to administration officials. It is believed to be the first time in the global war on terrorism that couriers have been apprehended with such a large amount of money, said the counterterrorism officials, some of whom monitor terrorist financing.

This is an excellent photo gallery of 9-11 events. Beware, it takes, at least, 20 minutes to see all of the photos. Scroll down, just a tad. Photo Gallery is on the left of page.