Free Republic

SO it wasn't a political stunt. It isn't about Iraq. And the threat of Islamist terror right here is more real than many pretend. How real? If the police are right, they have saved scores of you from being blown up -- as people in Madrid and London were blown up. As NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney put it, the arrest yesterday of 17 Muslim men disrupted "the final stages of a large-scale terrorist attack". He said explosive material had already been collected. Yet only last week, Prime Minister John Howard was pilloried by many for having warned of an...

A SYDNEY man allegedly telephoned the suspected leader of al-Qa'ida in Spain – Abu Dahdah – seeking help to move a "brother" and his family throughout Europe. The allegation about former Qantas baggage handler Bilal Khazal – made in documents tendered in Mr Dahdah's terrorism trial – contradicts claims by him that he had never spoken to the alleged terror chief, or even knew who he was. As more details of a network of alleged terror supporters in Australia emerged yesterday, it has been claimed a second Australian named in the Spanish court documents, Melbourne cleric Sheikh Mohammed Omran, was...

Australia's top investigators claim Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist before the September 11 attacks. Former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib trained as a terrorist in Pakistan before moving to Afghanistan to serve as a mercenary with al-Qaeda, Australia's top policeman has told a parliamentary inquiry. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty said Mr Habib received firearms training in Pakistan in the days before September 11, 2001 to prepare him for a border crossing into Afghanistan to join Osama bin Laden's terrorist organisation. Habib was arrested by Pakistani police inside Pakistan on October 5, 2001. "The investigators formed the view...

Group trying to block building name change: NASHVILLE, Tennessee -- A state appeals court heard arguments Wednesday over whether Vanderbilt University can remove the word "Confederate" from a dormitory the United Daughters of the Confederacy helped build in the 1930s. The Tennessee chapter of the group claims the university's effort to drop the first word from Confederate Memorial Hall violates decades-old contracts, but Vanderbilt claims the contracts are no longer valid. The judges, who did not say when they will issue a ruling, had strong words for both sides. "You're arguing social values and making the courts be the tough...

SCV supports Jaqueline Duty Confederate Prom Dress Lawsuit to be filed in Federal court in Lexington, KY Press Release - December 17, 2004 - For Immediate Release This past May Jacqueline Duty, an attractive honor student in Russell, Kentucky, prepared to attend prom night wearing a special dress she had designed herself. It was a classically cut strapless sheath, ankle-length with a shallow slit on one side, and sewn completely out of beaded sequins. And it tastefully incorporated a symbol of her Southern heritage; a Confederate Battle Flag turned upwards so that the starry blue arms of the St. Andrew’s...

Americans Owe Confederate History Respect By CHRIS EDWARDS The Time Has Come To Take A Stand After attending the Confederate Memorial Day service on June 1 in Higginsville, I found myself believing our nation should be ashamed for not giving more respect and recognition to our ancestors. I understand that some find the Confederate flag offensive because they feel it represents slavery and oppression. Well, here are the facts: The Confederate flag flew over the South from 1861 to 1865. That's a total of four years. The U.S. Constitution was ratified in April 1789, and that document protected and condoned...

As I drove down 5th street yesterday, I spied a bumper sticker that addresses an issue I have been waiting for an excuse to write about. It was in the back window of a pickup truck, whose ability to operate I found simply amazing, strategically situated between an empty gun rack and another sticker depicting Calvin (of Calvin and Hobbes fame) urinating on "Osama" with a devilish grin on his face. I will leave the "Osama" reference and defamation of an innocent newspaper comic strip character alone for the purposes of this article, and will concentrate on the content of...

Drive north on 17th Street, look left and up, and there it is. Kasey Montgomery hung a Confederate flag in his dorm room window at UNL to honor his Southern heritage but created controversy in the process. Despite complaints from students and university officials asking Montgomery to take it down the flag remains. It's a three-by-five-foot cut of polyester made in Taiwan, bought in Virginia and displayed in a North Carolinan's University of Nebraska-Lincoln dorm room. It's a piece of U.S. history linking our nation's only Civil War to George Wallace standing in a schoolhouse doorway to the bumper stickers...

Howard Dean and Yankee Democrats don't have a clue what it means to be a Southerner. It's not about Confederate flags. It's about honor, family, self reliance and American patriotism. Who are these Confederate voters that Vermonter Howard Dean wants to represent? Is Jefferson Davis on the ballot again? I thought he was dead, along with the Confederate States of America. Hey, I’m a Southerner, why didn’t I get the memo? Duh, Dean was just being "hisself", a Yankee liberal, describing voters as he sees people – divided by race, class and gender. What a hoot. Liberals imagine identity politics...

As a Louisiana native who is now living north of the Mason-Dixon Line, I am well aware of the concerted effort to erase Southern culture from the nation's collective consciousness. I have written numerous articles addressing this social cancer, and every time I do I inevitably hear from people who have the audacity to call me an extremist. "The Civil War is over," they say. "The South lost. Get over it!" Sure. Never mind that those of us who defend the South do so in response to the increasingly virulent attacks on our heritage. Forget that political correctness has...

Don't get me wrong. I live in the south, and I love the south. I spend my Saturday afternoons watching the Georgia Bulldogs and other southern college football teams; I enjoy true quality peaches and real grapes known as scuppernongs; I eat my fatback and grits; and the people are very nice. I simply disagree with them about politics and religion. The political beliefs of white southerners drag this country down. It has always been this way throughout American history starting with the issue of slavery. Most northern states gave up slavery as early as 1800, but for economic reasons,...

Friday, Nov. 5, 2004 I hate it when they do that - write a column that not only says what I planned to write but also has almost the same title I had in mind. But when the writer is Ron Marr, one of the best down-to-earth columnists on the Internet, I simply doff my hat. Ron sets off his column with a quote from what he called a "well-coifed anchor" whose voice dripped "with derision and condescension" when he told his viewers: "What we don't realize is that there's a huge segment of the country that doesn't think like...

Student Pulled from Class for Wearing Hempstead Shirt ATLANTA -- The town of Hempstead, New York, has a message for school officials in Gwinnett (gwih-NET') County, Georgia: Look at a map. That's after a student at a suburban Atlanta high school was thrown out of class for wearing a shirt that said Hempstead on it. Hempstead is the name of his hometown. But school officials apparently thought it was a reference to marijuana. His family says Terrell Jones was pulled out of class at Grayson High School Monday -- and wasn't allowed to return until he persuaded school officials to...

Time is GMT + 8 hours Posted: 22 August 2004 1252 hrs Australian Taliban fighter and Osama bodyguards to face US military justiceA TV grab of an undated photo of David Hicks taken in Kosovo. GUANTANAMO BAY US NAVAL BASE, Cuba : The United States will this week start controversial military proceedings against an Australian Taliban fighter and three bodyguards for Osama bin Laden. David Hicks, an Australian, two Yemenis, Salim Ahmed Hamdan and Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul, and a Sudanese, Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi, will be the first of the 585 detainees at the Guantanamo detention camp in...

The day Hicks met Osama bin Laden By PETER MITCHELL in Los Angeles 12jun04 THE case against Adelaide terror suspect David Hicks paints the former stockman as a renegade warrior. It says he bounced from terrorist groups in Albania and Pakistan, fighting in Kashmir, and then into the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida. According to case files, the convert to Islam was sounded out by a bin Laden associate on his willingness to carry out a suicide "martyr mission". He also allegedly met bin Laden and then translated al-Qaida training materials from Arabic to English after discussing the...

The US case against David Hicks paints the former stockman as a renegade warrior, bouncing from terrorist groups in Albania and Pakistan, fighting in Kashmir, and then into the hands of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda. According to case, the convert to Islam was, among other things, sounded out by a top bin Laden associate on his willingness to carry out a "martyr mission", meaning a suicide attack. He also allegedly translated al-Qaeda training materials from Arabic to English and answered questions from an al-Qaeda military commander about the travel habits of Australians. Despite being thousands of kilometres from his...

David Hicks, a 27-year-old Australian expatriate, is among the captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters detained at Camp X-Ray in Cuba. Like John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban," Hicks is a disaffected western youth who became enchanted with Islam, and was caught in a revolutionary undertow that took him first to Pakistan and then to Afghanistan. Hicks' case is particularly interesting because the first stop in his revolutionary odyssey was the Balkans, where he joined the so-called Kosovo Liberation Army (or KLA). During the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999, Hicks was one of several thousand international recruits who...

<p>WASHINGTON — Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen being held as an enemy combatant in the war on terror, continues to provide valuable intelligence to the government and will not be allowed access to a lawyer until those collection efforts cease, officials said Tuesday.</p>

Kirk: Fighting the Klingon terrorists is wrong. It will unfairly hurt minorities. Anyone proposing this attack on Klingons doesn't care about minorities. Sulu, set course for home. Full warp speed, Mr. Sulu. We don't want any sneak attacks as we gain ground to a safe port. Keep minorities in safety pods. Mr. Spock: Captain. Your statement is most illogical. Logic dictates that minorities in the Federation benefit from fighting terrorism even more than non-minorities. The large urban areas are prime terrorist targets. Kirk: Don't confuse me with the facts! As I see it, we are not retreating from the war....

A BRITON being held at Camp X-Ray, the high-security US prison for Al-Qaeda suspects, has blamed a radical Muslim cleric living in London for turning him to terrorism. In a confession to British and American investigators, Feroz Abbasi claimed that members of Finsbury Park mosque — the base of cleric Abu Hamza — helped to organise his terrorist training and provided him with air tickets to Afghanistan.Abbasi, 22, has also said that at one stage he wanted to be a suicide bomber to die a martyr.The confession, the first to emerge from the five British prisoners at Camp X-Ray in...