Free Republic

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama's name came up again at the Antoin "Tony" Rezko corruption trial and in a way that earlier filings in the case did not telegraph. Stuart Levine, the prosecution's star witness, said he and Obama were at a party Rezko threw at his Wilmette mansion on April 3, 2004, for Nadhmi Auchi, a controversial Iraqi-born billionaire who Rezko was trying to get to invest in a South Loop real-estate development. Auchi, now a citizen of the United Kingdom, has faced criminal charges in Europe. He also figured in the revocation of Rezko's bond early this year...

Accused Saddam Agent Says He Met With Hillary at White House By IRA STOLL, STAFF REPORTER OF THE SUN | March 27, 2008 A Michigan man facing federal criminal charges of illegally working for Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Intelligence Service says he met with Hillary Clinton at the White House in May 1996. In a 1997 interview with this reporter, Muthanna Hanooti said that at the meeting, Mrs. Clinton was "very receptive" to his request for an easing of the American sanctions on Iraq that were in place at the time. He said Mrs. Clinton "passed a message to the State...

WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors say Saddam Hussein's intelligence agency secretly financed a trip to Iraq for three U.S. lawmakers during the run-up to the U.S.-led invasion. An indictment in Detroit accuses Muthanna Al-Hanooti of arranging for three members of Congress to travel to Iraq in October 2002 at the behest of Saddam's regime. Prosecutors say Iraqi intelligence officials paid for the trip through an intermediary. In exchange, Al-Hanooti allegedly received 2 million barrels of Iraqi oil. The lawmakers are not mentioned but the dates correspond to a trip by Democratic Reps. Jim McDermott of Washington, David Bonior of Michigan and...

In a February report from Web site tracking and analysis firm Netcraft, the Apache Web server dipped below 60% market share for the first time since September 2002. Subsequent monthly reports indicated that the downward trend had continued unabated. Now, five months later, Netcraft's July Web Server Survey confirmed this decline: Apache again lost ground to Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS).In July, Microsoft added 2.4 million sites, bringing the total number of Windows Server sites above the 40 million mark, Netcraft found. Microsoft's market share also received a boost, increasing 1% since June to reach 32.8% overall. Apache saw an...

Cindy Sheehan, Tom Hayden, and the Hate America Left meet with pro-Ba'athist members of the Iraqi parliament to discuss “peace.” TO FIND PEOPLE WHO HATE AMERICA AS MUCH AS THEY DO, the Fifth Column Left had to go halfway around the world to meet with Iraqi political leaders who call terrorism “honorable national resistance” and say foreign jihadists “are guaranteed Paradise” – and at least one of whom has ties to militia leader Muqtada al-Sadr. By the end of the trip, the American leftists would echo these sentiments. Somehow most of the media – occupied with interminable coverage of Hurricane...

You've probably heard it said over and over: Saddam Hussein's regime was strictly secular ! That's not what the captured Iraqi Intelligence Service documants show ! But wait: There's more !

To read entire article click text: In a court hearing in San Diego, Kenneth Breen, an assistant United States attorney, said the adviser, Amr Ibrahim Elgindy, tried to sell $300,000 in stock on the afternoon of Sept. 10 and told his broker that the stock market would soon plunge. "Perhaps Mr. Elgindy had preknowledge of Sept. 11, and rather than report it he attempted to profit from it," Mr. Breen said. So, what did Mr. Elgindy, who was trying to sell $300k in stock, tell the financial world the day after 9-11?  Read it for yourself! Immediate release InsideTruth.com...

Watching the ball drop, twirling a noisemaker, kissing your sweetheart, and making a resolution that rarely comes to pass -- everyone looks forward to the memory of a new year. But one group will be ringing in the New Year a little differently…through a children’s jihad retreat, with a guest speaker who exalts terrorists and another who is linked to al-Qaeda. The majority of Islamic organizations within the United States have, at one time or another, been cited for their connections to terrorism, whether by support of terror groups or through actual terrorist activity carried out by its members. Two...

SADDAM HUSSEIN'S REGIME PROVIDED FINANCIAL support to Abu Sayyaf, the al Qaeda-linked jihadist group founded by Osama bin Laden's brother-in-law in the Philippines in the late 1990s, according to documents captured in postwar Iraq. An eight-page fax dated June 6, 2001, and sent from the Iraqi ambassador in Manila to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Baghdad, provides an update on Abu Sayyaf kidnappings and indicates that the Iraqi regime was providing the group with money to purchase weapons. The Iraqi regime suspended its support--temporarily, it seems--after high-profile kidnappings, including of Americans, focused international attention on the terrorist group. The...

E-mail Author Author Archive Send to a Friend Version January 13, 2006, 8:11 a.m. The Butcher with the Terror Ties The evidence mounts. Drip, drip, drip. Drop by drop, isolated news stories and emerging documents are eroding the popular myth that Saddam Hussein had no connections to Islamofascist terrorists. These revelations undermine war critics’ efforts to whitewash Baghdad’s ancien regime — such as when Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid declared: “There was [sic] no terrorists in Iraq.” Likewise, Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) describes a “nonexistent relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” Reid, Levin, and others who dismiss...

BaghdadOn a cool December morning, Vice President Dick Cheney and U.S. ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad waited for their distinguished guests on the sidewalk outside of the ambassador's residence in the heart of the fortified Green Zone in downtown Baghdad. Moments passed, but no one came. As Khalilzad chattered in Cheney's ear, the vice president stood looking at the cloudless blue sky with his hands clasped behind his back, sporadically shuffling his right foot back and forth. They waited some more. An eager press corps-with cameras and microphones, pens and pads at the ready--waited to capture the handshake between Cheney...

By JAMES RISEN WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — As American soldiers massed on the Iraqi border in March and diplomats argued about war, an influential adviser to the Pentagon received a secret message from a Lebanese-American businessman: Saddam Hussein wanted to make a deal. Iraqi officials, including the chief of the Iraqi Intelligence Service, had told the businessman that they wanted Washington to know that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction, and they offered to allow American troops and experts to conduct an independent search. They also offered to hand over a man accused of being involved in the...

The man backed by many in the Bush administration to head Baghdad's postwar government said Sunday that documents uncovered over the weekend show that Saddam Hussein tried to recruit U.S. citizens to undermine the Bush adminsitration's war effort in Iraq. "We have captured a great many files of Saddam's services and there is astounding information about the extent of their networks and their efforts to recruit foreign nationals - including Americans - to work in the Mukabahrat [Iraqi intelligence service]," said Ahmed Chalabi, head of the Iraqi National Congress. "I think that this is something that must be pursued,"...

In the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore...

Susan Lindauer, the former Democratic congressional aide charged with spying for Iraq, was arrested several months after meeting with an FBI agent who posed as a Libyan intelligence agent looking to recruit support for Iraqi groups attacking U.S. forces in the aftermath of the war. According to the indictment charging Lindauer with conspiracy to spy for Iraq, that meeting took place on June 23, 2003, in Baltimore, Maryland. The indictment charges that Lindauer and the agent "discussed the need for plans and foreign resources to support [resistance] groups operating within Iraq." The indictment says Lindauer met with the agent again...

AHMED HIKMAT SHAKIR IS A shadowy figure who provided logistical assistance to one, maybe two, of the 9/11 hijackers. Years before, he had received a phone call from the Jersey City, New Jersey, safehouse of the plotters who would soon, in February 1993, park a truck bomb in the basement of the World Trade Center. The safehouse was the apartment of Musab Yasin, brother of Abdul Rahman Yasin, who scorched his own leg while mixing the chemicals for the 1993 bomb.When Shakir was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks, his "pocket litter," in the parlance of the investigators, included contact...

"In August 1998, the detainee traveled to Pakistan with a member of Iraqi Intelligence for the purpose of blowing up the Pakistan, United States and British embassies with chemical mortars."  U.S. government "Summary of Evidence" for an Iraqi member of al Qaeda detained at Guantanamo Bay, CubaFOR MANY, the debate over the former Iraqi regime's ties to Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network ended a year ago with the release of the 9/11 Commission report. Media outlets seized on a carefully worded summary that the commission had found no evidence "indicating that Iraq cooperated with al Qaeda in developing or...

Tired of playing second fiddle in Web hosting, Microsoft is revamping its server software in an attempt to snatch market share away from the popular Apache-Linux combination. When the software giant releases Longhorn Server in 2007, it will introduce a re-architected edition of its Internet Information Services Web server, said Bob Muglia, senior vice president in charge of Windows Server development. The changes will make IIS more modular, which will speed up performance for Web applications, he said. "We're componentizing IIS so you can load just the pieces of the Web server that you really need," Muglia said. "In the...

1) Most security breaches are caused by not following basic security guidelines and best practices. We want to put IIS 6.0 to the test to see if it is highly secure when you implement it correctly. 2) Because it's a fun way to engage with you, our audience! 3) It's a chance to share knowledge and demonstrate how to protect your system against hack attempts. Coming in our July issue, we'll publish an article "How to Set Up a Hackproof IIS" featuring Roger Grimes' recap of the contest, and sharing the secrets of how he created an impenetrable IIS environment.

Nicole Martin shows a confidential handwritten memo found in the rubble of the looted Iraqi foreign ministry to the man who used to arrange the dictator's scheduleSaddam Hussein's former head of protocol said yesterday that the document found by The Daily Telegraph saying that George Galloway received substantial payments from the Iraqi regime was "100 per cent genuine". Haitham Rashid Wihaib, who fled to Britain with his family eight years ago after death threats, said he had no doubt that the handwritten confidential memorandum addressed to the dictator's office apparently detailing how the Labour MP benefited from Iraq's oil sales...

I sweet-talked my way into dreaded intelligence HQ(Filed: 27/04/2003) Inigo Gilmore describes how he gained access to documents in the complex that most Iraqis under Saddam were desperate to avoid.The documents which provide the first proof of direct links between Osama bin Laden and the regime of Saddam Hussein were hidden deep inside a building which for decades was one of the most feared places in Iraq. During Saddam's time, few civilians dared even glance at the imposing headquarters of the Mukbaharat - the feared intelligence service - as they drove past in case they were hauled in and...

From leaky roofs to secret agents: how the files I found in Iraq's looted foreign ministry cast light on the paranoid world of Saddam Hussein How many Iraqi officials does it take to fix the leaky roof of a diplomat's house in London? How long does a skilled translator need to convert one of George Galloway's parliamentary speeches into Arabic? In almost 1, 000 pages of Arabic prose, each stamped with the Eagle crest of Iraq, the files found inside the foreign ministry in Baghdad cast a somewhat surreal light on the questions that turned the bureaucratic wheels of Saddam...

WASHINGTON — An Iraqi-born American citizen pleaded guilty Tuesday to several charges as part of the federal investigation into the U.N. Oil-for-Food program, becoming the first person to be convicted in the growing scandal. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced the agreement with Samir Vincent, accused of being an unregistered Iraqi agent between the first and second Persian Gulf wars. [SNIP] The case is being handled by the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York. The criminal indictment and plea deal were filed in federal court in the Southern District of New York. [SNIP] The Justice Department said that from 1992 to...

US CERT (the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team), is advising people to ditch Internet Explorer and use a different browser after the latest security vulnerability in the software was exposed. A statement on the CERT site said: "There are a number of significant vulnerabilities in technologies relating to the IE domain/zone security model, the DHTML object model, MIME type determination, and ActiveX. It is possible to reduce exposure to these vulnerabilities by using a different web browser, especially when browsing untrusted sites." CERT otherwise recommends users to set security settings to high and disable JavaScript Malicious code, dubbed variously as...

IIS 5 Web Server Compromisesadded June 24 US-CERT is aware of new activity affecting compromised web sites running Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS) 5 and possibly end-user systems that visit these sites. Compromised sites are appending JavaScript to the bottom of web pages. When executed, this JavaScript attempts to access a file hosted on another server. This file may contain malicious code that can affect the end-user's system. US-CERT is investigating the origin of the IIS 5 compromises and the impact of the code that is downloaded to end-user systems.Web server administrators running IIS 5 should verify that there is...

NEW YORK -- A mysterious Internet virus being spread Friday by hundreds and possibly thousands of infected Web sites may be aimed at stealing credit card and other valuable information, security experts warned. The infection appears to take advantage of three separate flaws with Microsoft Corp. (MSFT) products. Microsoft said software updates to fix two of them had been released in April, but the third flaw was newly discovered and had no patch to fix it yet. Experts said the infection, detected by Microsoft on Thursday, was unusually broad but wasn't substantially interfering with Internet traffic. Security experts at...

Security researchers warned Web surfers on Thursday to be on guard after uncovering evidence that widespread Web server compromises have turned corporate home pages into points of digital infection. The researchers believe that online organized crime groups are breaking into Web servers and surreptitiously inserting code that takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer that Microsoft has not yet fixed. Those flaws allow the Web server to install a program that takes control of the user's computer. The extent of the attacks is unknown, but the security community has seen numerous cases of personal computers infected when the user...

CHICAGO - Government and industry experts warned late Thursday of a mysterious, large-scale Internet attack against thousands of popular Web sites. The virus-like infection tries to implant hacker software onto the computers of all Web site visitors. Industry experts and the Homeland Security Department were studying the infection to determine how it spreads across Web sites and find adequate defenses against it. "Users should be aware that any Web site, even those that may be trusted by the user, may be affected by this activity and thus contain potentially malicious code," the government warned in one Internet alert. The...

<p>TAKOMA PARK, Md. — A woman accused of acting as a paid Iraqi intelligence agent said Wednesday she is misunderstood and was only trying to help prevent a war in Iraq (search).</p> <p>Susan Lindauer (search) told The Associated Press she was being punished because she got involved in U.S. foreign policy. She said her intent was to persuade Iraq to allow weapons inspections before the war and to get it to cooperate with the war on terror.</p>

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY HAS A BIG PROBLEM named Susan Lindauer, but you would never know this from the reporting by America’s dominant Left-leaning news media. Last Thursday Ms. Lindauer, 41, was arrested in her suburban Washington, D.C. home and charged with “prohibited financial transactions” from, acting as “an unregistered agent of,” and “conspiring” to act as a spy, both before and after the incursion a year ago, for Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Intelligence Service (IIS). Known in Arabic as the Mukhabbarat, the IIS has reportedly been involved in terrorist operations, intimidating and killing Iraqi defectors and dissidents, and according to Anwar...

Case ClosedFrom the November 24, 2003 issue: The U.S. government's secret memo detailing cooperation between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden.by Stephen F. Hayes 11/24/2003, Volume 009, Issue 11     Email a Friend   Respond to this article OSAMA BIN LADEN and Saddam Hussein had an operational relationship from the early 1990s to 2003 that involved training in explosives and weapons of mass destruction, logistical support for terrorist attacks, al Qaeda training camps and safe haven in Iraq, and Iraqi financial support for al Qaeda--perhaps even for Mohamed Atta--according to a top secret U.S. government memorandum obtained by...

Is there any significance to what Web server/platform combinations 2004 presidential candidates are using? As we swing into the thick of the 2004 electoral playoffs, it's interesting to see what kinds of platforms are running under the candidates' official campaign Web sites. Netcraft has a handy feature called "What's that site running?" that lets us see combinations of Web servers and OS platforms. So here's a quick rundown, in alphabetical order: George W. Bush: Microsoft IIS on Windows 2000 Wesley Clark: Apache on Linux Howard Dean: Apache on FreeBSD John Edwards: Microsoft IIS "behind a computer running NetWare" Richard Gephardt:...

Tried accessing WorldNetDaily this morning and get a "505" error. Is anybody else having trouble accessing the site? (I live in Florida; Verizon is my cable/DSL carrier.)

When I am asked about the case for sending people into space, my answer is that, as a scientist, I’m against it. Most of what astronauts do in space can be done better and more cheaply now by computers and robots. Each advance in robotics and miniaturization only widens the efficiency gap between man and machine in space. Circling the Earth for months on end, the International Space Station is nothing more than a huge turkey in the sky. Now that only two astronauts are aboard the craft, the pursuit of any serious projects is even less likely; most of...

June 4— BRUSSELS (Reuters) - Belgian police have intercepted at least five envelopes containing white powder, including one addressed to the prime minister's office and another to the U.S. embassy, fearing it may be anthrax or another dangerous substance. Police had yet to determine the nature of the suspicious powder, a spokesman for the interior ministry said.The letters were reminiscent of the anthrax mailings in the United States which killed five people following the September 11, 2001 attacks in New York and Washington.Those letters caused a global scare that the bacteria was being used as a biological weapon.Belgian police seized...

Transcipts of documents linking Iraq to Bin LadenDocument 1, dated February 19, 1998 Marked "Top Secret and Urgent" in the margin and signed by "MDA", thought to be the codename for the director of one of the intelligence sections within the Mukhabarat. "The envoy is a trusted confidant and known by them. According to the above mediation we request official permission to call Khartoum station to facilitate the travel arrangements for the above-mentioned person to Iraq. And that our body carry all the travel and hotel expenses inside Iraq to gain the knowledge of the message from bin Laden and...

<p>Baghdad -- The huge, monumental building is crumpled like scrap paper, but it is surrendering its secrets slowly.</p> <p>The central headquarters of the Mukhabarat, Saddam Hussein's intelligence service, sits behind wide-open gates in central Baghdad, visited by a nonstop stream of impoverished Iraqis who, since the arrival of U.S. troops two weeks ago, have looted anything of the remotest material value -- from lamps to telephones to file holders.</p>

<p>ON OCT. 29, 2002, a memo from Directorate 14 (in charge of special operations and “wet work” like assassinations) reported that “one of our sources in the United States, with a high level of reliability, says the CIA and the so-called opposition have a joint plan to bring ‘quislings’ to Iraq from the north and south to gather information and await future missions. Our informant will be one of them.” The memo suggests, disturbingly, that Saddam had a mole somewhere inside U.S. intelligence. Did he? Might he still? As the CIA’s legendary mole hunter James Jesus Angleton once said, espionage is a “wilderness of mirrors,” not least within spy services themselves, so it is hard to know. IIS agents routinely recycled old newspaper clips from foreign media and passed them off as secret reports from “informants of high reliability.” In a mid-2002 memo, the IIS chief reported that Saddam himself had ordered “a reassessment of our people abroad because information that the stations overseas send in are all in the public domain or from the media.”</p>

Saddam tried to cut a deal before the bombs started to fall Documents implicating German involvement in an attempt to co-operate with the Iraqi secret service in the months before the Iraq war have surfaced from the ruins of Baghdad. Secret documents recovered from the bombed headquarters of Saddam Hussein's secret service in Baghdad show that German spies attempted to forge links with their Iraqi counterparts over a year before the war began. The papers, recovered by British journalists working for the daily newspaper The Telegraph, describe a meeting between German secret service agent Johannes William Hoffner, described as "the...

FOR three days, American tanks have been shelling a military intelligence building in the posh Al-Khathamia area in west Baghdad. The dozen or so tanks are not here to pound intransigent fighters but to break down concrete beams and steel, to reach bunkers deep underground at the Al-Istikhbarat Al-'Askariya facility. The Marines found 123 prisoners, including five women, barely alive in an underground warren of cells and torture chambers. Being trapped underground probably kept them safe from the bombing of Baghdad by the coalition. Severely emaciated, some had survived by eating the scabs off their sores. All the men had...

<p>A Moscow-based organization was training Iraqi intelligence agents as recently as last September -- at the same time Russia was resisting the Bush administration's push for a tough stand against Saddam Hussein's regime, Iraqi documents discovered by The Chronicle show.</p>

RUSSIA SPIED ON BLAIR FOR SADDAM... // Top secret documents obtained by the Sunday Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders... MORE...

op secret documents obtained by The Telegraph in Baghdad show that Russia provided Saddam Hussein's regime with wide-ranging assistance in the months leading up to the war, including intelligence on private conversations between Tony Blair and other Western leaders. Moscow also provided Saddam with lists of assassins available for "hits" in the West and details of arms deals to neighbouring countries. The two countries also signed agreements to share intelligence, help each other to "obtain" visas for agents to go to other countries and to exchange information on the activities of Osama bin Laden, the al-Qa'eda leader. The documents detailing...

Security firm: MS flaw over-hyped By Matthew Broersma ZDNet (UK) December 2, 2002, 7:01 AM PT A recently-revealed security flaw in Microsoft's Internet Information Server may have been over-hyped, according to testing figures from a UK-based Internet research firm. Netcraft's figures also showed that the large Web-hosting businesses that gained prominence in the 1990s are continuing to lose out to smaller, customer-supported firms. According to figures from Netcraft, not many IIS servers are likely to be open to an attack that exploits a flaw in Microsoft's Data Access Components (MDAC), despite the flaw receiving a "critical" rating by Microsoft last...

<p>Enterprises last week had 11 more reasons to rethink using IIS: 10 new security holes in the Microsoft Web server and the arrival of Apache 2.0. After three years of development, Apache 2.0 (or, more accurately, Version 2.035) has finally been released. Unix users will find plenty to like in Version 2.0, but the biggest impact will be on Windows servers, where Apache can now perform as a production-level Web server.</p>

BA pulls IIS web servers offline in Code Red scare By Network News staff [03-04-2002] BA tightens IT security and dumps unauthorised Microsoft servers BA has ditched 100 "unauthorised" web servers running Microsoft IIS from its network after fears the software could be a target for the Code Red virus.The move came after the company found the web servers had been installed by staff "without the correct authorisation procedures". "As part of our normal housekeeping procedures we launched an internal review of our use of Microsoft web servers," said a BA spokesman. "We are undertaking a project to remove the...