Free Republic

National Security: Contrary to popular opinion, Rep. John Murtha, the decorated ex-Marine who called for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, is no hawk. He may also soon be probed for misusing defense appropriations. "If you want anything done on the committee, you go to Murtha." He's delivered so much pork to his congressional district, an airport and a major highway are named after Murtha. Ashdown and his nonpartisan watchdog group criticized Murtha for using the $417 billion fiscal 2005 Pentagon spending bill to give business to his lobbyist brother. The Los Angeles Times in June reported that Murtha funneled nearly...

Reacting to negative statements released by members of the US Senate at the hearing held Tuesday to discuss Saudi Arabia s cooperation in fighting terrorism and extremism, Prince Turki Al-Faisal, the Saudi Ambassador to the US, said that these statements promote false impressions and partial facts. Citing tangible efforts made by the Saudi government in the past few years to fight terrorism, Prince Turki said that the statements of the committee members and of witnesses undermine the will of both the Saudi and the US people, according to Al-Riyadh, the Arabic language daily newspaper. He added that the international community...

Responding to last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Saudi Arabia’s role in the war on terror, entitled “Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?”, Riyadh’s ambassador to the U.S., Prince Turki al-Faisal, charged the committee members with ignorance. "Judging by the statements made at the hearing, it appears that the members of the Committee are not fully aware of the significant steps Saudi Arabia has taken in the war on terrorism and extremism.” Worse, according to the prince, U.S. senators “chose to ignore the realities for the sake of political expediency.” Did they really? The U.S....

Washington renews blacklist of eight countries considered violators of religious freedoms including Saudi Arabia, Iran. The United States on Tuesday renewed its blacklist of eight countries considered violators of religious freedoms, turning back requests to add Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice extended the designation of US ally Saudi Arabia as a "country of particular concern" as well as that of China, Iran, Myanmar, North Korea, Vietnam, Eritrea and Sudan. "These are countries where governments have engaged in or tolerated particularly severe violations of religious freedom over the past year," Rice told a news conference. "We are...

DIPLO WON'T TESTIFY IN SAUDI PROBE By NILES LATHEM WASHINGTON — The State Department abruptly pulled a top official from testifying at a Senate hearing on Saudi links to terrorism today amid a massive lobbying campaign by Saudi agents to discredit the proceedings, The Post has learned. A State Department spokeswoman confirmed that Alan Misenheimer, the department's director of Arabian Peninsula and Iran Affairs, had bowed out of testifying at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing exploring whether Saudi Arabia was a friend or a foe in the war on terrorism. Other officials said Misenheimer's appearance was scrapped due to concerns...

The Saudis are at it again, and this time America's school children are the victims. It's no secret that the princes in Riyadh fund anti-American, anti-Israel, and anti-Semitic propaganda in mosques and madrassas across the globe. But now a yearlong investigation by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency exposes that the oil kingdom's virulent tentacles also stretch into America's public school system. The JTA says textbooks used in public schools across the country "are highly critical of democratic institutions and forgiving of repressive ones." The books also "praise and sometimes promote Islam, but criticize Judaism and Christianity and are filled with false...

EDUCATORS and religious scholars are mostly against letting children watch Shariah court verdicts like beheading, stoning to death, amputation or lashing, a report said Sunday. Exposing children to violent and gruesome scenes may make them aggressive and effect their personality, he said. am of the view that children must be forbidden from watching the execution of Shariah penalties so that we are able to protect our future generations from negative effects, in the same way as some countries that prevent children from watching films with horrifying scenes, Dr. Abdul Aziz Bin Abdullah Al-Dakheel, Assistant Professor of Social Service in King...

Ex-president Clinton's decision to ask Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah for a high-dollar donation to his presidential library came just months after Saudi leaders rebuffed his request to take custody of Osama bin Laden - when officials in Sudan, where the al Qaeda chief was then living, offered him to the U.S. Former FBI director Louis Freeh revealed on Thursday that Clinton personally put the touch on Abdullah after failing to get the Saudi leader's cooperation in the probe into the June 1996 Khobar Towers bombing, which - according to the 9/11 Commission - was a joint al Qaida-Hezbollah operation. The...

JEDDAH, 3 October 2005 — Saudi Arabia yesterday denied press reports that it was engaged in secret negotiations with Britain over a $70 billion arms deal. However, it pointed out that London had expressed its desire to sell Typhoon fighter planes to the Kingdom. “There are no secret negotiations between the two countries on the deal to sell the Typhoon planes,” the Saudi Press Agency quoted a Defense Ministry spokesman as saying. “But the British side has openly expressed a desire to supply Saudi Arabia with these planes, like any of the many friendly countries which produce sophisticated weapons systems,”...

In support of Jihad Watch News Editor Eric Schwappach's post below, here is a MEMRI report -- "Saudi Government Official on Iqra TV: All Muslims Must Support Jihad – Send Money to the Saudi Committee for Support of the Al-Quds Intifada, Account No. 98" -- indicating once again that nothing much has changed in Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi protestations to the contrary in the face of the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act: An August 29, 2005 program on Saudi Iqra TV was devoted to supporting Jihad in Palestine. The program host began by telling all Saudis that they must donate and...

VIENNA, AUSTRIA - Saudi Arabia is defying the United States, the European Union and Australia by resisting U.N. efforts to verify that it has no nuclear assets worth inspecting, according to a confidential EU document obtained by The Associated Press on Tuesday. There is little concern the Saudis are trying to make nuclear arms, but Riyadh’s resistance to inspections adds another worry for a top-level meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency this week that is focusing on North Korea and Iran. Those two countries are the world’s major concerns about the spread of atomic weapons. On Tuesday, the IAEA...

JEDDAH, 16 May 2005 — The 150-member Shoura Council yesterday strongly condemned the reported desecration of the Holy Qur’an at the hands of US officials at Guantanamo Bay and asked the United States, if the incident was true, to apologize in order to avoid hatred and violence. The Shoura urged the US authorities to launch a prompt investigation into a May 9 Newsweek magazine report that investigators probing abuses at the US military prison in Guantanamo Bay found that interrogators had desecrated the Qur’an to rattle Muslim prisoners. “If the report proved true, it would become important that an apology...

'I'm self-sufficient now. I earn enough to support my family and I'm not dependent on benefits." The pride in Sandy Mitchell's voice is unmistakable. Given what he has been through, it is also justified. Five years ago, the tough Glaswegian was earning his living working in a hospital in Saudi Arabia as an anaesthetic technician, putt-ing in canulas, checking doses and weighing patients before they had operations. He and his Thai wife had just had a baby. He was happy and prosperous. Then, on December 17 2000, he was kidnapped by Saudi Arabian police as he got out of his...

Saudi Arabian men's habit of marrying their first cousins is creating a health and cultural crisis in the kingdom, says an analyst of international affairs who has studied demographic issues in the Muslim state.

-- WHEN the Taliban fell, two visions emerged within the Islamist terror movement. One vision, identified with Osama bin Laden, wants the movement to continue targeting the West, especially the United States. The other, advocated by Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda's No. 2, wants the "holy war" concentrated in Muslim countries, especially Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

BOSTON— A Saudi princess was arrested Wednesday on charges she forced two women to be her domestic servants and threatened to harm them if they tried to leave, according to federal prosecutors. Hana Al Jader, a Saudi national, is married to Prince Mohamed Bin Turki Alsaud, according to a source close to the case, speaking on condition of anonymity. It wasn't immediately clear what relationship, if any, the couple has to the Saudi royal family. Al Jader, 39, is accused of confiscating the passports of two Indonesian women who worked as domestic servants at the family's homes in Arlington and...