Free Republic

For nearly seven years, scientist Bruce E. Ivins and a small circle of fellow anthrax specialists at Fort Detrick's Army medical lab lived in a curious limbo: They served as occasional consultants for the FBI in the investigation of the deadly 2001 anthrax attacks, yet they were all potential suspects. Over lunch in the bacteriology division, nervous scientists would share stories about their latest unpleasant encounters with the FBI and ponder whether they should hire criminal defense lawyers, according to one of Ivins's former supervisors. In tactics that the researchers considered heavy-handed and often threatening, they were interviewed and polygraphed...

In the summer of 2014, as his followers were ravaging the cities of northern Iraq, Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi convened a secret meeting with a weapons expert whose unusual skills the terrorist chief was anxious to acquire. His guest was a small man, barely above 5 feet tall, and he had only recently been freed from a years-long stint in U.S. and Iraqi prisons. But before that, Salih al-Sabawi had been an Iraqi official of some renown: a Russian-trained engineer who had once helped President Saddam Hussein build his extensive arsenal of chemical weapons. Baghdadi had summoned Sabawi,...

...The two attacks on opposite sides of Africa are among the scores of violent episodes to shake the continent in what experts are calling a breakout year for extremist groups affiliated with al-Qaeda or the Islamic State. .... The spike in terrorist attacks mirrors a steady, if less dramatic, increase in Islamist violence in parts of Syria and Iraq, driven by Islamic State fighters who slipped away after the caliphate’s defeat and have now regrouped.... The resurgence threatens to undermine one facet of President Trump’s reelection pitch to voters: his oft-repeated claim of victory over the Islamic State. ...The rise...

The Washington Post apparently changed the headline of their obituary of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi from "terrorist-in-chief" to describe him as an “austere religious scholar.” U.S. forces killed Baghdadi Saturday after a successful raid on a compound in northern Syria. While many celebrated the death of the serial rapist and murderer, the Washington Post left many confused by giving him the title of “austere religious scholar at the helm of the Islamic State.”

The Department of Justice on Wednesday announced the arrest of a Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) official for allegedly leaking classified information to journalists, including one that he was apparently in a relationship with. Law enforcement officials arrested 30-year-old Henry Kyle Freese of Virginia and charged him with two counts of willful transmission of national defense information. If convicted, he faces a maximum of 20 years in prison.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House on Wednesday angrily denied a newspaper report that suggested President George W. Bush in 2003 declared the existence of mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq while knowing it was not true. "It's reckless reporting. Everybody should be agitated about it," White House spokesman McClellan told reporters of The Washington Post report. On May 29, 2003, Bush hailed the capture of two trailers in Iraq as mobile biological laboratories and declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." Two days earlier, on May 27, 2003, the Pentagon confirmed on Wednesday, a Defense Intelligence Agency...

The White House on Wednesday hit back at The Washington Post for its front-page story this morning which suggested President Bush in 2003 cited the discovery of mobile biological weapons labs in Iraq as "weapons of mass destruction" just after the Pentagon received a top-level report revealing this was not true. Press Secretary Scott McClellan called the account "reckless reporting" and asked media outlets who carried it to apologize. He said Bush made his statement based on multiple sources. Appearing on MSNBC Wednesday night, the Post reporter who wrote the piece, Joby Warrick, stood by the reporting, and said he...

... "The lead suggested that what the president was saying was based on something that had been debunked, and that is not true," McClellan said. "In fact, the president was saying something that was based on what the intelligence community - through the CIA and DIA - were saying." ...

Lacking Biolabs, Trailers Carried Case for War Administration Pushed Notion of Banned Iraqi Weapons Despite Evidence to Contrary By Joby Warrick Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, April 12, 2006; A01 On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction." The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the...

April 12, 2006 More deception from the Washington Post While the Washington Post frets about a U.S. military "propaganda campaign" against Zarqawi that consists of spreading true information reasonably calculated to save American lives, the Post conducts a propaganda campaign against the administration that's based on distortion. The latest instance is today's story on the Bush administration's statements that certain Iraqi trailers were biological laboratories. As Ed Morrissey shows, the Post's report is highly deceptive. While trumpeting the fact that a team of experts concluded after the invasion that, contrary to the administration's claim, the trailers were not bio labs,...